


Shell Game: Jalapeño

by ivorygates



Series: No Quarter [8]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Apocalyptic Curtain Fic, Completist posting, F/M, I am very suggestible, M/M, Multi, Porn Fixit, Why do you think the net was born?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-25
Updated: 2006-12-25
Packaged: 2019-10-18 12:51:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 40,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17581193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: "How much cooperation we can expect from you," O'Neill answers."Oh, Jack, that depends on what you want," Daniel answers.





	Shell Game: Jalapeño

**Author's Note:**

> Author's Notes: I have a hard date for the writing window here: Sunday, August 13, 2006—Monday, December 25, 2006. This implies that I had already written and posted the original version (on LJ), as this is exactly the same story but with the addition of graphic porn. (2006 was the year my New Year's Resolution was "Learn To Write Porn". I think Waterloo Bridge was also written that year.) The reason I never posted this one is because I didn't get the last porn insert done. That is probably a permanent condition now. Sorry.
> 
> The title "Shell Game: Jalapeño" is because this is supposed to be the hot version. It is also a harkback to my working title for "Shell Game", which was "Hot Like A Really Hot Thing". You can thank Cofax7 for the fact that HLARHT does not _remain_ the title.
> 
> PS: This can be read as a standalone because seriously: exact same story plus porn.
> 
> PPS: This version remains an essentially un-copychecked first draft because at this point I may go mad if I have to look at it again.

"You have come for the Fair?"

A little man stops SG-1 at the edge of the grounds. There's a kind of archway, and it looks like everyone is checking in. Beyond that, there are tents, and booths, and barns—the stolen MALP is in one of them, somewhere—and the whole thing looks like Dorothy's cyclone picked up the State Fair instead of Auntie's house, except for the fact that O'Neill doesn't see a Ferris Wheel. Not a cloud in the sky, either. Perfect Fair weather.

The others fan out behind him. P8X-747 is, technically, a moon, not that O'Neill can see much difference; grass, trees, blue sky; it looks pretty much like home except for the fact that half the sky is taken up by something that looks like Jupiter. At night the view must be impressive, though he bets you don't see many stars out this way. Maybe the real reason everybody comes here is for the view; the MALP showed a lot of traffic through the Gate before it was carried off. The cameras are still running—it's in one of those barns somewhere, so they're here with a FRED full of trade goods and orders to make nice with the natives, and get that MALP back if humanly possible. MALPs are expensive.

They're also supposed to pick up anything else that looks interesting while they're at it, because the Culture Wonks up on 19 think that 747 is some kind of interstellar shopping mall, based on the footage they saw from the MALP before it got stuck in a barn under a tarp.

O'Neill looks at the guy under the archway. Counter, cashbox, it looks like there's an admission fee. Just as well figuring things like that out aren't his problem.

"Nyan, you're up," he says.

Nyan pays the entrance fee in counterfeit _Goa'uld sheshta_ straight from the SGC mint, but the metal's good. O'Neill thinks they're being rooked, but there's not much to do about it, is there? Nyan explains that they've come to trade, and gets a pretty fair idea of which barn the MALP might be in.

The man weighs the little metal disks Nyan gives him in a scale—after testing them with acid to see if they're true silver—and gives Nyan change. Then he holds up one of the disks and squints at it curiously.

"You are not _Goa'uld_. Where are you from?" He doesn't seem particularly upset about it, though he's staring at Teal'c's Jaffa-mark like he's trying to remember where he's seen something like that before. Just making conversation, the way people do to pass the time.

"They are of the _Tau'ri,_ with whom my allegiance lies," Teal'c says firmly, and the man nods, like he's gotten the answer to a trivia question that would have kept him up all night.

"Peace of the Fair," he says, waving them through.

"Peace of the Fair," Nyan answers.

#

"You need a hat," O'Neill decides, after they've gone a few steps across the fairgrounds. The place smells like summer, and there are horses here somewhere. Trees in the distance, but the Fairgrounds themselves are set in the middle of a large open plain. Meadow. Whatever.

"I do not, O'Neill."

"Everybody's starin' at you, T."

Teal'c looks away, not dignifying the remark with a reply. But they _are_ staring. Not screaming and running. Just staring, curiously, like people who know about the _Goa'uld_ and the Jaffa perfectly well and can't figure out what one is doing at the Kansas State Fair. O'Neill digs in his vest.

"Okay, then, tie this around your head. Because we aren't here to get into a fight and I'm _not_ spending the rest of the day renting you out for pony rides."

Teal'c looks long-suffering, but obeys, tying the bandana around his head to conceal the mark of Apophis.

#

They reach the Big Barn, their FRED in tow. The MALP is there, along with a lot of other alien junk that makes Carter's eyes gleam. The place looks like a giant swap meet.

"Sir," she says excitedly.

"Yeah, yeah," he says. He looks around. Alien junk or not, the place still smells like hay. He walks Carter past the MALP and encourages her to feign interest in a display of broken _Goa'uld_ power crystals spread out on what looks like an old horse blanket.

The current proprietor of the MALP probably won't let it go cheap. It's one of the brightest, shiniest things here.

"You _do_ know how to bargain, right, Carter?" he asks hopefully.

"One of the best, sir," she says stoutly. She looks up at him. "I spend a lot of time at flea markets, Colonel."

"Okay," he says. "You and Nyan go ... bargain. Get the MALP back, and pick up anything else that looks useful."

"What about you, sir?"

If all four of them hover, it's just going to drive the price up.

"Teal'c and I are going to go to the Fair."

#

He does one radio check to make sure everything's in working order, and after that he doesn't joggle Carter's elbow. She'll call if she needs him. He makes sure he and Teal'c stay in line-of-sight of the barn, just to stay on the safe side. Just because everything looks peaceful now doesn't mean its going to stay that way.

P8X-747 is more of a shopping mall than a fair, really. Everybody's got something for sale. The first several booths are pretty harmless. Pots. Rugs. Jewelry. Cloth. Food (but he learned his lesson on Argos.) The vendors come out into the aisles, urging the patrons to buy. Same old, same old.

Past the rugs, there's an open area where the horses he smelled earlier are tethered. He and Teal'c both like horses, and linger. The competition for their attention is greater here; horses are big-ticket items. And there are some pretty ones, in colors you don't see on Earth. O'Neill is about to make the obvious joke about the 'horse of a different color', knowing that Teal'c probably won't get it (though it's hard to tell with Teal'c) when he looks past the horses.

The Fair is selling a commodity even more expensive than horses.

There's a short street on the other side of the horse fair, set up a good distance away. The left side of the street has awnings on poles, similar to those that shaded the booths where the pots were being sold a few streets back. The right side of the street has a series of large open-topped wooden cages. There are people standing quietly beneath the awnings, and as O'Neill watches, a man with a yoke and buckets passes slowly down the street, passing a tin cup into the cages. Hands reach out, taking the cup and returning it. And he knows they haven't stumbled on the local jail.

"Ah, T? Time to turn back."

It's not what he wants to do. But slavery is a way of life out here. Hell, it's still a way of life in half the countries on Earth and nobody's willing to start a shooting war there. All he could do—here, today—is get some people killed.

He'll put this in his report, though. And maybe there will be a trade agreement with these gentle happy people, and someday they'll be convinced to give up slavery and everything will be wonderful.

Sure.

And someday Earth will destroy the _Goa'uld_ , too.

Teal'c has already seen what O'Neill has seen. He doesn't need O'Neill to draw him a map. Teal'c was a _Goa'uld_ slave before O'Neill's grandparents met.

They turn to go, and one of the shills hovering at the edge of the slavemarket comes running across the open field. He skids to a stop and plucks at O'Neill's arm.

"You are _Tau'ri._ My master has _Tau'ri._ Please, come and look. The best stock in the Fair—the only _Tau'ri."_

O'Neill stops and looks down. A kid. Not starved or beaten—and how would that make things better? Maybe twelve. He's wearing sandals and something that would make a pretty good mini-dress.

He's wearing a collar.

"You're selling _Tau'ri_ in the slave market?" O'Neill asks, just to be sure.

"Yes," the boy says. "I swear to you. They are _Tau'ri._ Like yourself. It is always best to buy one's own kind, my master says. I am from Nerial, and so is my master, and we are very happy. _Tau'ri_ should go to _Tau'ri._ You should see them! Young, beautiful, both virgins, in all my days I have never—"

"Just show me," O'Neill says, because the last thing he wants to do is listen to a sales pitch for human flesh.

#

"O'Neill?" Teal'c asks quietly.

"Might be a Gate Team," he says. There are Teams still listed as Missing In Action, and it's not impossible that some of them are here. "If it isn't, we're outta here."

He's not sure how to keep that promise to himself, especially if they offer him children.

They walk across the open field, and down the short street to its end. He doesn't want to look, but he can't help assessing. Each of the cages holds only one person—all men. Plenty of room to move around. A bench at the back. None of the men seems to be injured. There are about twenty cages, twenty men. The people under the awnings on the other side are a mixture of men and women. They're all dressed about like the boy is. Nothing's keeping them from running off—except for the fact that they're slaves, and they know it.

The boy brings them to a tent at the end of the street. It's the only tent in the slave market, and it's huge and gaudy, made of bright blue and silver brocade that shimmers so hotly in the sun that O'Neill's glad he's wearing his sunglasses. The front is open, but all there is to see inside is a low square platform—a display block, obviously—and chairs—three of them—on either side of the block, angled to give a good view. An opaque curtain in a paler blue than the tent itself partitions the back from the front. The merchandise will be brought out from the back, once interest is expressed.

There are a couple of empty tables as well—they'll hold tea, O'Neill thinks, or dates, once the haggling starts. The floor of the tent is covered with a rug—just one, big enough to cover all of it. Rugs that big are expensive. Everything about this setup is expensive, and automatically O'Neill strokes the barrel of his gun, thinking of places he went long before he ever heard of the Stargate.

There's a sign outside in a language O'Neill can't read.

"Exotics," Teal'c translates quietly.

The boy skips inside and slips through the curtain in the back, and O'Neill follows him into the tent, pulling his sunglasses off in the dimmer light. The enclosure has a faint floral scent; everything is very clean. As he walks inside, a girl he hadn't noticed—she was sitting at the back of the tent, very still—gets to her feet.

She's wearing the same slave costume as everybody else, but she doesn't look like anyone else he's seen on 747. Her skin is black—not black like Teal'c's, but black like ink—and her hair is striped, black and white, like a cat's fur.

Exotics.

Her eyes are human, though. They're blue.

"Peace of the Fair! Ah, I see you are admiring Rashul. I'm sorry, she is not for sale, but if I could—"

The slave dealer isn't, unfortunately, a cliché. He looks like a guy who could be selling insurance back home, or coaching Little League. He looks a lot like the kid: brown and brown, maybe early forties. The usual Stupid Alien Costume, and too much jewelry, but at least he's wearing pants. No weapons in sight, but O'Neill bets there's a leg-breaker or two behind the curtain. There always is.

The slave dealer holds out an arm and Rashul scurries under it, looking up at him—fondly? Hard to tell with skin that dark. But this is an opening act O'Neill has seen before: _see how well I treat my merchandise..._  
"Your boy said you had _Tau'ri_ for sale." One of the many sentences he once couldn't have imagined uttering. "If he was lying, we're leaving."

"Atini would not lie to you, Master...?"

"Colonel Jack O'Neill."

"And I promise you, my stock does not lie to me. They are _Tau'ri._ The first ever seen at the Fair. Until you arrived, of course."

Word travels fast. "Bring them out."

"Atini. Bring out the twins."

"Yes, Master Ixis."

The boy ducks behind the curtain again. Ixis pats Rashul fondly and she goes back to sit in the corner again. O'Neill takes a deep breath, waiting to see what comes out from behind the curtain.

_'I promise you, my stock does not lie to me.'_

He counts his own heartbeats. Refuses the offer of a chair.

The curtain opens again, and Atini returns, guiding two ... slaves ... toward the display platform. It's a man and a woman, and they're barefoot. Light brown hair, chin-length on both; obviously it's been cut to match. The tunics they're wearing are both shorter—and sheerer—than the others he's seen, and he can see that their bodies have been shaved. They're collared and manacled. Their heads are down; O'Neill can't see their faces, but there's something terribly familiar about them both, the man more than the woman.

Then they step up onto the platform and raise their heads defiantly, and intuition becomes impossible certainty.

Behind him, Teal'c goes from still to immobile.

It's Danny. Danny, here, alive, meeting his eyes with recognition—and the woman beside him looks enough like him to be his twin sister. He expects Danny to say something: _Hi, Jack, I'm back, sorry I took so long to come back from the dead, sorry I scared you_ —

—but it's the woman who speaks.

"Jack?" she says, and there's horror and recognition and terror in her voice. She jerks against the manacles, and O'Neill sees that the two of them are chained together as well as simply being chained. For one moment it's obvious that the only thing in the woman's mind is _getting back through that curtain_ —and Danny's moving with her, stumbling because she's pulled him off-balance, but then Ixis moves up behind her and puts a hand on her hip, pushing the hem of her tunic up and touching bare flesh. There's a pop and a spark from one of the rings on his hand, and she jerks and goes still.

"Now, children," Ixis says mildly. "Manners."

"Touch either of them like that again and I'll kill you," O'Neill says, raising his weapon.

"Jack," Danny says urgently. "Don't. We're not who you think we are."

They take their positions carefully on the block again.

"I'm sorry," the woman says. She's speaking to Ixis. Her voice is deeper than O'Neill expects. "He startled me. Please forgive me."

Ixis reaches up to pat her reassuringly while Danny glares warningly at O'Neill.

"You'll have to do better, child. I know this is your first time on the block, but how would Daniel feel if your behavior brought your price down? Or forced me to ...mmmm... sell you separately?"

O'Neill counts his heartbeats. He reaches ten before she speaks.

"I will do better. Master Ixis." She sounds breathless.

"There's my good sweet girl. As you see, Colonel, I'm concealing nothing regarding any flaws they may have. This is a wild-caught pair, and normally I would not consider offering them—you can see that they're far from polished—except for the fact that they're absolutely identical."

O'Neill lets the slave master's spiel wash over him, ignoring it. He walks over to the platform.

"Come down here," he says, and they step off the platform obediently.

"Do you want to—?" Ixis begins.

"I want to talk to them," O'Neill says.

Ixis shrugs faintly and retreats—out of earshot if they keep their voices low—his manner saying that he's gotten weirder requests from potential buyers.

O'Neill studies their faces. _Identical,_ Ixis had said; that has to explain why they're here, in the hands of a slaver who only deals in 'exotics.' The woman is about six inches shorter than the man is, but if Danny had been born a woman, he'd have looked just like her. And the man...

Is Danny. Yes. And no.

"Are you all right?" he asks the woman. She shrugs slightly.

He looks back at Danny. No, Ixis called him _Daniel._ Daniel is looking at him with recognition, yes—they both are, which is the spooky thing. But not quite...

"Who are you?" he asks.

The man smiles ruefully. "Ah. Yes. Long story. My name is Daniel Jackson. This is _Danielle_ Jackson. We aren't, ah, clones or anything. Of anyone you may... remember."

"Or robots," the woman says.

"Or that," Danny, no, _Daniel,_ agrees. "Look, are you familiar with the theory of alternate universes?" His voice drops further, though his guarded, pleasant expression doesn't change.

"No," O'Neill says succinctly. He doesn't look toward Ixis.

They look at each other for a moment.

 _"Star Trek?"_ Danielle asks. "You... watched _Star Trek,_ right?"

"Sure," he says. Okay, this is officially one of the weirder conversations of his life.

"And you remember the episode where Spock had a beard?"

He just stares at her. She takes a deep breath.

"Okay. That's an alternate universe. Alternate universes are real. There are a lot of them. Daniel—and I—are from two different alternate universes. This is a third universe." Her lips barely move; her voice is a prison-yard whisper now. This is obviously information she's been keeping from Ixis.

"You're not from here?" he asks, wanting to be sure he understands her. He hasn't completely followed her explanation, but this is no time to play dumb. His voice is as low as hers.

"No," Daniel says. "If your history has gone anything like ours, SG-1 has had a lot of narrow escapes over the years, and we—you—have been pretty lucky, though I guess it didn't seem like it at the time, given that I'm—he's—dead. Well there's a statistical inevitability that those universes would have to be in the minority, and well, anyway—"

O'Neill holds up his hand.

"The... short version?"

"Ori," Daniel says.

"Furlings," Danielle says.

O'Neill has never heard of either one. He sighs in exasperation. "Come on, kids. Give me something to work with, here."

They look at each other for a moment before Danielle tries again.

"Daniel met the Ori in his universe. I met the Furlings in mine. It didn't work out well, um, I mean.... Fortunately—which I guess is a relative term, given our current situation—each of us had managed to locate the Quantum Mirror on a previous mission, so we were able to escape."

"Escape. What?" O'Neill says, very slowly and clearly, because he's gotten a lot of words from Stereo Danny, but not a lot of sense.

They look at each other and back at him and shrug. "Our... universes... were... _gone,"_ Daniel says with quiet urgency. He's choosing his words with care, and O'Neill wonders what he isn't saying. Danny was like that, when he was trying to edge around the truth. "But the Mirrors were still there."

"Quantum Mirrors?" Danielle asks, because apparently they can both tell they've lost him.

Quantum Mirrors. Sounds like Carter's department. But they're getting somewhere now. The two of them were running away from something. Two different somethings. Universe-destroying somethings.

He can't imagine Danny running from a fight.

"I thought the Furlings built them," the woman adds. Another shrug. "Anyway, they were still there, at the... end. I went through. Eventually, I met up with Daniel. I'd met one before—briefly."

"Not me," Daniel says with a faint smile. So much like Danny's.

"No," she agrees.

"Anyway," Daniel says, "I'd already used the Mirror once, because Oma told me to, so I wouldn't be caught up in the Great Ascension. She said it was important. But then the Priors kept showing up. So I'd move on." He looks toward Danielle.

"I'd stay by the Mirror until I passed the 48 hour window. More universes have Daniels than Danielles, statistically, so I was usually safe. But the Furlings kept arriving, even when I learned to stay away from the SGC. Then at one Mirror I ran into Daniel."

She looks back at Daniel; apparently it's his turn to continue the story.

"I told her about the Ori. And we figured there might be a chance that they wouldn't follow us if we stayed together. So we spun the controller on the Mirror as far as we could—to the Alternate that _should_ have been as far from ours as we could get—and went through together," Daniel says.

"We both lived past the 48 hour limit, so we stayed," Danielle adds. "It's been three hundred and seventy days. Neither the Furlings or the Ori have showed up, so I guess this is a safe place to..." She shrugs again. "Then this happened." She raises their hands a little and the chains clink. "On the bright side, all of Master Ixis's wares come to market fresh from the sarcophagus. And that was fun."

Danny always had a flaky sense of humor. Apparently a sex-change hasn't changed that.

"I'm sorry he's dead," Daniel adds quietly.

"How do you know it isn't her?" O'Neill asks, jerking his chin at the strange pretty copy of Danny standing quietly beside Daniel.

"You can't stop looking at me," Daniel answers.

O'Neill pinches the bridge of his nose, trying to make all those _words_ settle into some kind of sense.

"You're not...?"

"The Daniel Jackson who died here. No."

"And something—big—was chasing both of you?"

"Each of us," Danielle corrects. "I never saw an Ori Prior, Daniel never saw the Furlings. But they've never left us alone this long before. So you—all—should be safe, even though we're here."

"And you've been here...?"

"Three hundred seventy days," Daniel repeats. "Guests of Master Ixis for the last, um, call it three months. It's the longest we've ever stayed anywhere, so—"

"Are you satisfied, Colonel? Do you wish to offer for them? I must say, it would be a shame if you didn't; they chatter away to you like little calling-birds, and it took me forever to get them to trust me," Ixis says, stepping forward. Apparently O'Neill's test drive is over.

Ixis snaps his fingers, and the two of them step backward up onto the platform. It's a graceful move. They must have practiced.

O'Neill wonders just how many trips through the sarcophagus it took before they told Ixis their names. He wonders where their glasses are.

"Yes," he says. "I'm satisfied. I'm afraid I don't have my checkbook with me, though."

Ixis doesn't know what a 'checkbook' is and he obviously doesn't care. "You have trade goods, though?"

O'Neill smiles coldly. "Oh, yeah."

"Jack, you can't be serious!" Daniel yelps indignantly. "You've got to get out of here. Now."

"He doesn't actually want to buy us," Danielle says to Ixis. The slavemaster shakes his head at her indulgently and smiles.

O'Neill ignores them. He keys the 'talk' button on his radio.

"Bought anything yet, Carter?" he asks.

"Ah, no, sir. The dealer—"

"Don't worry about it. Deal's off. We're buying something else." He looks at Master Ixis. "And while we're waiting for my checkbook to show up, let's talk about the fact that I happen to know that these guys aren't quite as perfect as you'd like me to think they are, and what that's going to do to the price."

#

The first time Carter sees them is after the deal is closed; they were taken off back behind the curtain as soon as O'Neill said he wanted to buy them.

To get them costs SG-1 all of their trade goods, their packs and contents (excepting weapons), the FRED they brought to carry the MALP back, and O'Neill's yo-yo.

On the bright side, they also get two pairs of glasses in addition to two _Tau'ri_ slaves.

When the boy—not Atini, this one's older, and wearing pants—ushers O'Neill's new purchase out from behind the curtain for the last time, Carter makes a noise like somebody's run over her cat.

"Oh, my god," she says, "it's—"

"No it isn't," he says quickly. "I'll explain on the way."

They're wearing heavier and slightly longer tunics now, and sandals.

"Ah," Nyan says comprehensively.

O'Neill makes Ixis take the slave collars off before they leave.

#

It's evening, what with one thing and another, when they start back for the Stargate. Just a nice summer evening in the kind of Kansas you don't find in storybooks. The kind with slave markets, where people come back from the dead. Danny has died before and it hasn't been permanent, but this last death was too final, with a bloody shattered body brought back from a Jaffa ambush on a planet whose name O'Neill doesn't want to remember. He'd never expected to see Danny alive again in a slave-market on an alien planet a year later. And he certainly hadn't expected him to be twins.

"You should _not_ have done that!" Danielle says, as soon as they're clear of the Fair.

"You wanted to be _sold?"_ O'Neill demands.

"You were here on a mission—what about that?" she shoots back. It's almost like having Danny alive again. Daniel is the quieter of the two.

"It wasn't very important. Carter, Nyan, meet Dr. Danielle Jackson. In _Star Trek,_ Danny was a girl."

From the look on her face, Carter doesn't think much of his explanation.

"Look, Jack, she's right. We were fine where we were." The other half of Team Jackson, this time.

"You call that fine?"

"And once he sold us, we could have escaped," Danielle finishes, as if that's the clinching argument.

"And done what?" O'Neill asks. The answer to that might be entertaining, but he doesn't get one. "We were fine," Daniel repeats stubbornly.

 _You always needed a keeper,_ O'Neill thinks. "We don't leave our people behind," he says.

"Well, we're not your people, are we?" Danielle says, and she's as maddeningly reasonable—and flat-out wrong—as Danny ever was.

"Who _are_ you, if you're not... Danny?" Carter asks, flinging herself bravely into the fray before the real shouting starts. "Sir? General Hammond will want an explanation for why we aren't coming back with the MALP."

"Oh, Carter, I'm just gonna tell him we found something we liked better."

#

General Hammond's face when SG-1 'plus two' comes down the ramp is pretty much all that O'Neill could hope for.

"Colonel O'Neill," he says, "you indicated you were bringing two ... refugees ... back with you from P8X-747. Please tell me that, despite appearances, that's not Dr. Jackson."

"Well, sir, apparently they're both Dr. Jackson," O'Neill says. "Permission to escort our guests to the infirmary?"

"Granted," General Hammond says. "And then I expect you to come right back here and tell me just what the devil is going on."

#

Both of them recognize Frasier, but they're as surprised to see her as she is to see Daniel, which O'Neill finds interesting.

"Well, ah, Danny, we never expected..." she says.

"I'm Daniel," he says. _"This_ is Dani." He puts a hand on the back of the woman beside him, and she takes a step forward.

"It's good to see you," she says. "It's 'again' for me, but I realize we've never met, Dr. Frasier."

Frasier blinks, looking stunned but game. "And ah, you're...?"

The woman smiles. "Dr. Danielle Jackson. I know this is probably a bit of a shock..."

"All in a day's work," Frasier says briskly. "Now if you'll both come this way, we'll get started."

#

"...so they're both claiming to be Dr. Daniel Jackson?" Hammond asks.

O'Neill really wishes now that Carter had been there to hear the story, because trying to remember the details is making his head hurt.

"Yes, sir, more or less. They say they both came from two other, ah, _universes_ where there was big trouble, and had to escape. Not together. They met up with each other later. They say the trouble kept following them, so they had to keep going through something called an... ah... 'Quantum Mirror.' They say they've been here for about a year, so they think we're safe from whatever's been following them. They recognized me, they recognized Frasier. I can't explain it, sir."

"And you have no idea what this 'Quantum Mirror' might be?"

"We really didn't get a lot of time to talk. That Ixis guy was all over them. He said he was selling them as a set because they were identical. That's all I know, sir."

"Major Carter?"

"I didn't really get a chance to question them before we brought them back, sir. Maybe they'll be willing to tell us more now."

"Whoever they are," O'Neill mutters under his breath. Because the more he sees of Daniel, the less he seems like Danny. The woman is actually more like him, and that's just wrong on so many levels.

And seeing both of them brings back things he doesn't want to remember. Running for the Gate, and Danny falling.

"Colonel?" General Hammond says.

"Oh, by all means. Let's all have a nice chat."

#

The Doctors Jackson are brought up from the infirmary, Janet Frasier in attendance. They gravitate immediately to the coffee; O'Neill watches. Black, four sugars, and he wonders whether they just despise the powdered creamer as much as Danny did or don't take milk. It's strange the things you wonder about at a time like this.

Frasier's initial report isn't encouraging, if what you want to be encouraged to believe is that they're who they say they are. The DNA scan is still running—they won't have the results for a few hours yet, though at least Danny's DNA was still on-file so they had something to run a comparison _with_ — but though their blood-type matches Danny's file—and so do their finger prints and retinal scans—dental records and X-rays don't. Scars that should be there—old injuries, surgical scars—are missing.

"I told you," Danielle says, sounding irritated. "Ixis put us in a sarcophagus."

"That doesn't explain the dental anomalies," Frasier says. "Danny had—"

"They grow back," Daniel says.

There's a moment of silence.

"So could we just presume we're us until you get some kind of DNA proof that we're not?" Danielle says irritably. "Because I can't begin to tell you how many times I've sat right here and gone through this with people who looked just like you, and I'm getting really tired of it."

"Dani," Daniel says. He puts a hand on her arm.

"I didn't ask to come here," she mutters.

"Neither of us did," he agrees gently. "But we're here now, and I'm guessing that Jack and Sam and General Hammond have a few questions for us."

"Perhaps we could start with how you got here," General Hammond says.

"We found the Quantum Mirror in the first year the SGC was operating, back in, ah 1997," Daniel says. "Sam theorized it was a portal into alternate dimensions. The theory behind that is that every reality that can exist, does exist. The Mirror was what helped us destroy two _Goa'uld_ mother ships before they reached Earth, by letting me—each of us—bring back vital information from an alternate universe where they already had."

Carter is nodding, so apparently this makes some kind of sense to her.

"The Quantum Mirror allows you to travel into those other realities, but there's a catch. If there's already a 'you' there, after about 48 hours, something called Temporal Entropic Cascade Failure happens, and the 'you' that came from outside starts to, well, come apart. We never completely understood it, but it's painful, lethal, and—as far as we knew—there's no way to stop it," Daniel continues.

"So you can only travel to alternate universes in which you don't exist?" Carter asks.

"Not exactly," Danielle says, shaking her head. "You can visit any of them as long as you leave again before the deadline. You can stay forever in one where your double is dead. Or where they're ... flipped."

Carter looks inquiring. Danielle gestures at Daniel.

"Sometimes I'm born male. In about three quarters of the universes I've visited, in fact. Entropic Cascade Failure didn't affect me there. Apparently it makes me non-identical enough to survive," she says.

"This is fascinating," Carter says slowly. "The chance to actually see alternate realities, know how different versions of history played out? But... you said you'd discovered the Quantum Mirror during your first year of missions...?"

"And it looks like you didn't," Daniel says. The two of them glance at each other, and now, when it's much too late to do any good at all, O'Neill thinks that it just might have been a good idea to talk to them separately.

"We'd kind of like to know where it is," he says.

Daniel smiles and looks down at the table. "It was never anything but trouble. We had to destroy ours."

"This cannot be the case, Dr. Jackson. Colonel O'Neill has indicated that you utilized it to escape into our reality," Teal'c says.

"Oh," Daniel says. "That. Well, that's actually sort of the, ah, middle of a very long story. If you'd like, I could start from the beginning."

"Oh, please do," O'Neill says. He notices—and he's sure General Hammond has too—that the Gate address for the Planet Of The Quantum Mirror hasn't been forthcoming.

"Well, as I already told Jack, my universe was overrun by the Ori. They're Ascended Ancients—I don't know if you've encountered the Ascended, but if you have, the Ori aren't like the ones you know. The Ori want to enslave everyone and force them to worship them, in order to add to their power so that they can eventually wipe out the Ascended. Our existence here, uh, _there,_ was being concealed from them by the Ascended Ancients until I stumbled over a big cache of Ancient artifacts and alerted them to our presence. They sent their followers to our galaxy in ships that nothing we—or the _Goa'uld_ , or even the Asgard—could stop. Of course, on the bright side, we didn't have to worry about either the _Goa'uld or_ the Replicators after that. The Ori wiped them both out; and once the Jaffa had all accepted Origin—what could they do? As far as they could see, the Ori really _were_ gods—the Ori essentially had military control of the galaxy."

"And that would be bad," Jack says.

"Yes, Jack, that would be bad," Daniel agrees patiently. "Under Ori rule you spend most of your time reciting _The Book of Origin_ and the rest spying on your neighbors; it's like a combination of Puritan England and Nazi Germany. That doesn't leave much time for maintaining an advanced society, not that the Ori care about that. Neither did anyone else once the Ori got a hold of them; anyone who wouldn't bow to the will of Origin was torn to pieces by mobs of the Ori's fanatical followers, because it was death to rebel, and the Priors told them that if they spent their entire lives groveling, the Ori would Ascend them when they died. It's a lie, of course. We managed to find out that much. We couldn't do much more. It took less than a year from the time the first Ori Prior burned himself to death in the SGC to the time that just about every place we'd ever been to or heard of had bowed to the will of Origin, turning everything that lived into nothing more than batteries to fuel the Ori's insatiable hunger for power."

"These Priors? I'm guessing they aren't all named 'Richard' or something like that," O'Neill says.

Daniel purses his lips, but O'Neill can tell he's amused. "They're sort of Ori Jaffa; it's hard to explain—"

"Try."

"Neither the Ascended nor the Ori are actually supposed to interfere directly on our physical plane of existence. It's a rule the Ascended made for themselves, and they could force the Ori to follow it in our Galaxy. But they couldn't stop the Ori from giving ordinary humans extraordinary powers and sending them out to act as their agents. An Ori Prior is pretty much a _hok'taur—_ advanced human—capable of telepathy, telekinesis ... and, of course, of performing any miracles the Ori happen to need performed."

"Convenient," O'Neill says.

"Very," Daniel agrees blandly. "We thought it was bad enough to be losing the war out there, but then Earth went Ori. They hit us with a plague; their usual conversion technique—it killed half the people on Earth in the first week, so when the Priors showed up, hundreds of them, everywhere, promising salvation..." Daniel shrugs, and doesn't bother to finish the sentence. "When the first cases showed up, we started getting everyone we could through to the Alpha Site following the Genesis Protocols. Jack sent me through with the last group. By then the Mountain was in lockdown; sealed. About an hour after I got there, a Prior walked through the Stargate and said that he'd spare everyone at the Alpha Site if I'd accept Origin, and he'd give me 24 hours to decide. After he left, I dialed back to the SGC, but I couldn't get a lock. I never got one again."

The two of them are holding hands now, O'Neill sees, though Daniel's voice has been calm and steady throughout, as if this were a report of any mission.

"Things got pretty ugly after that. There were a lot of civilians there, and the Prior had made sure that everyone had seen him make his offer. Rumors started flying around that I was the one responsible for the plague on Earth in the first place. Colonel Reynolds thought it would be better if I lay low somewhere else until tempers cooled off. So I took a pack and headed off to a nice deserted planet—great beaches, you'd like it—and after about three days I figured it was a little odd that I hadn't heard from Colonel Reynolds, so I went back to the Alpha Site. Nearly everyone there was dead. The rest of them were dying: Ori plague. Colonel Reynolds was still alive. He said they hadn't died because I wasn't there to accept Origin. He said the Prior had told them they were being killed to punish them for trying to kill me before I could."

"You tried," Danielle says.

"I memorized the whole damned _Book of Origin,"_ Daniel says flatly. "It didn't do any good. I couldn't stop the Priors, I couldn't stop the Ori, and I couldn't even convert to Origin to stop them from killing any more people. For some reason I was vital to their plans, but I never figured out why. I kept running, because every time I stopped a Prior would show up, and it didn't matter if the people around me were followers of Origin or not; he'd kill them because I wouldn't bow down to the Ori." Daniel laughs bitterly. "I actually tried once. The Prior said I was mocking the will of the Ori, that I wasn't _sincere_. After that I just ran and hid, trying to find some place I could get word to the Asgard—safely—even assuming they were still out there anywhere. Eventually Oma Desala found me. She was one of the—good—Ascended. She said they had a plan, a Great Ascension, that would destroy the power of the Ori forever, but it would only work if I wasn't there. 'Dead' wouldn't cut it; I had to disappear from the universe entirely. She led me to a Quantum Mirror—either it was a second one, or she'd made a new one, because, like I said, we'd destroyed ours. I didn't think twice. If leaving my own universe would screw up the Ori's plans, great." He stops and takes a sip of coffee, staring down at the table.

It would be an unbelievable story, except for the fact that they've all seen things nearly as weird over the last six years. If he's lying, he's doing a damned good job. He doesn't seem to care whether they believe him or not. And the things he's tossing out so casually—the Asgard, the Alpha Site, the Genesis Protocols—are things only Danny—or someone else at the SGC, or someone at the NID—could know about.

But he's mentioned the Ascended, too, and Danny never knew about them. Only he's not trying to convince them he's Danny, is he? He wants to convince them he's someone else. Although he isn't, quite. It's gut-wrenching, looking at him, because it's Danny's face, Danny's gestures. Looking at both of them, really. The woman is jarring. All of Danny's gestures. Talks like him, almost sounds like him. And then O'Neill looks straight at her—she's been watching him through most of this, as if his reaction is the most important one—and her femaleness is a shock all over again.

He wonders what her story is.

"But you went through this Quantum Mirror more than once?" Carter asks. Daniel shakes his head; it's exasperation rather than disagreement.

"I had to. The Priors kept showing up, even in alternate universes. But from then on the Mirror was, ah, right where I'd found it in the first place. I'd only gone through two or three Mirrors before I met Dani. She was having a similar problem—being chased through the Mirror, only for her it was by the Furlings. We decided to stay together in hopes that the things that were following us would, I don't know, avoid each other. Yours was the first universe we went to together. It was safe for both of us, it's obvious, because I no longer existed here, but we thought we'd found a variant so far away from the mainline that I-or-she had simply never been born, there was no SGC, no Stargate Program, nothing. And nothing ever showed up to bother us. It was great."

"Except for the slave thing," O'Neill says.

"We got careless," Danielle says.

He raises his eyebrows.

"We're pretty much identical," she says. "And some of the worlds out there have some sophisticated technology, just, oh, scattered around in bits and pieces. Half the time the people who use it don't know what they have. Anyway, there was a gene-scanner in a tavern in this town; the proprietor was using it to make sure his patrons couldn't slip out without paying. I was working there as a scribe. Daniel came in and walked past it, and the alarms went off because, of course, I was already there, and then I had to go and try to explain the concept of 'genetically identical' to the tavern keeper. I finally had to settle for calling it ' _Goa'uld_ magic,' and he threw us both out and I lost half the money I'd made. We thought that was bad enough, but someone sold the information to Ixis—who _did_ know what 'genetically identical' meant—and a few days later he picked us up." She shrugs. "And then you came along. Any chance you'd just let us go?"

"Where would you want to go, Dr. Jackson?" General Hammond asks. He's looking a little sandbagged by this point, and O'Neill doesn't blame him. It's a lot of information to take in, and they haven't gotten the half of it yet.

"Back through the Stargate," she says promptly. "You could pick the world. It doesn't matter."

"Now why would you want to leave when you just got here?" O'Neill asks.

"Because I'm not interested in spending any more of my life in a cage," she snaps.

 _'I don't want to spend my life in a cage, Jack,'_ Danny had said.

"I'm afraid you're both going to be our guests for a while longer," General Hammond says. "At least until we've had some opportunity to verify your claims."

Danielle turns in her seat to glare at him. "What would you like to verify, General Hammond? In 1996 Catherine Langford recruited me for Project Giza—then being run by General West—to translate the Giza Coverstone. I solved in two weeks what had stymied her team for two years, but Jack _still_ felt he'd prefer to take Dr. Meyers to Abydos instead. Fortunately for me, Gary broke his ankle at the last moment—on the Gate ramp, actually—and I replaced him. On Abydos we encountered and destroyed Ra and freed the Abydans. Jack and the survivors of his team returned, I stayed behind. A year later, after Apophis discovered and attacked the SGC, now under your command, General, Jack, Sammy, Kawalsky, Ferretti, and a new band of heroes returned to Abydos. While they were there, Apophis came. He kidnapped my brother, taking him to Chulak. Two newly-formed commando units, SG-1 and SG-2, succeeded in following them there, using Gate coordinates that Ferretti provided. We were unable to stop Skaara from becoming a host, but we _were_ able to recruit Teal'c, who joined SG-1. We returned to Earth and spent the next several years seeking weapons and allies in our fight against the _Goa'uld_ —like you, Nyan; we rescued you from the Bedrosian military. Of course, if it hadn't been for us, you wouldn't have been in trouble in the first place, so I guess we have to call it even. And I can't prove any of this, because I'm not from here. Daniel?"

Daniel blinks, and smiles faintly. "Ah... Meyers was an idiot; Jack never had any intention of taking him to Abydos. I married Sha're; Kasuf didn't adopt me. Apophis took both Sha're and Skaara as hosts. Catherine recruited me in New York, not at Berkeley. Other than that, about the same."

It's a nice doubles act; O'Neill has to give them that. He doesn't remember Meyers at all—Catherine had a lot of geeks, and aside from Danny, none of them stood out—except for the fact that Danny was still bitching about Meyers years later.

Daniel's version of history matches reality more closely than Danielle's does. It doesn't prove anything.

"In that case, if you're familiar with the program, you'll both understand that I have to take precautions," General Hammond says. "We'll try to make you as comfortable as possible."

O'Neill can tell from the position of their arms that they're holding hands again; under the table this time. Danielle looks alarmed, but then, Danny never had any poker face at all.

"General, if I could make a suggestion? Why don't we stick 'em in Isolation Quarters? Nice roomy suite, 24/7 A/V." The four of them were locked up there when they had Urgo in their heads. It wasn't bad.

"Dr. Frasier?" General Hammond says.

"I have no medical objection, sir. They both seem to be perfectly healthy. There's no reason to confine them to the Infirmary."

"And I take it neither of you has any objection?" General Hammond says.

"Oh no," Danielle says. "As I recall, Isolation Quarters are just charming. I'm guessing you'd like us to go there now?"

"Maybe after you tell us about what was chasing _you,"_ O'Neill says.

She's starting to get to her feet. When he speaks, she goes tense all over and settles back into her chair reluctantly. "Several thousand years ago there was an alliance of four great races, of which two, the Nox and the Asgard, survive today. One of the others was the Furlings." She stops.

"And?" O'Neill prompts, because she'd said—back on 747—that her entire universe was gone.

"I don't know what they wanted, or why they did what they did, or exactly what they did, or where they came from, or how to stop them," she says flatly, staring down at the tabletop. All pretense of cooperation is gone; whatever she knows about the Furlings, she obviously doesn't intend to tell them.

"I think that's enough for the time being," General Hammond says.

She gets to her feet—taking a last gulp of her coffee—and Daniel follows.

"We'll do lunch," Jack says to her, and is rewarded with a faint smile. The SFs escort them from the room.

General Hammond looks at all of them. "Daniel Jackson is dead," he says carefully. "You brought his body back yourself. I attended his funeral. We buried him a year ago."

"Yes, sir," O'Neill says.

"Sir," Carter says, "neither of them is claiming to be Danny—our Danny. They're just ... versions ... of him. Alternate versions from an alternate universe, who have gotten here through a Quantum Mirror."

"If they're that," O'Neill says, just to be difficult. It seems impossible, but he believes that they are. He knew Danny better than anyone here. These two are enough alike him to be his cousins, but no more like him than that. That's what's so convincing, O'Neill thinks.

"We'll know more as soon as the rest of the lab results are back," Frasier says. "And speaking of that, I ought to get back down to Medical. If they've actually been in a sarcophagus for as long as, ah, _Daniel_ seems to have implied that they were, I'd better keep a close eye on them."

"Dismissed, doctor," General Hammond says.

"Notice they weren't really eager to tell us where this Mirror thing was?" O'Neill says after Frasier leaves.

"Yes, Colonel, that point had not escaped me," General Hammond says heavily. "Nor has the fact that Dr. Jackson—the young man—was not exactly clear on just where he found whatever device it was that allowed him to contact the Ori in the first place."

"I do not believe we would wish to contact these 'Ori,'" Teal'c says, after a moment's thought.

"Granted," Hammond replies. "But I'm not completely comfortable with leaving something like that lying around loose, either. And there might be other objects of value at the site."

"If it even exists in our universe," Carter says. "There's certainly a possibility of variation between universes, even major ones. Look at ... Danielle."

"Look at what she hasn't told us," O'Neill replies. Daniel did most of the talking, and it was a fairly good introduction to his situation. But all they know about her problem is that it's called 'Furlings' and she thinks it's equally bad. And that her universe is—apparently—gone too.

"I'm sure she'll be more forthcoming in time, Colonel," General Hammond says. O'Neill has his doubts. Danny might never have been able to lie convincingly, but he'd been damned stubborn. But on the other hand, he could never out-stubborn General Hammond, and O'Neill doesn't think his twin sister will have any better luck. There's too much at stake here, and the two of them damned themselves out of their own mouths the moment they mentioned using the Quantum Mirror to destroy _Goa'uld_ motherships. About four years ago, two _Goa'uld_ motherships entered the Solar System and then attacked each other. Both were destroyed. No one ever knew why. If the two of them are actually who they say they are, they might have the answer to that question.

In short, the two of them are either a gold mine of strategic information and potential resources—

—or a ticking time bomb.

The five of them kick the problem around the table a while longer, but without more information, there aren't any answers yet. All they can do is wait and see.

#

Isolation Quarters looks just the way she remembers. She glances at Daniel, and can tell from the way his eyes narrow that it's true for him, too.

The SFs lock them in.

"Think they'll feed us soon?" she asks, walking around the common room. It's the middle of the afternoon here on Earth—she saw a clock down in the Infirmary—but by her body's clock, it's evening, and for the last three months she's been used to two regular meals a day. She knows it's been three months, since, despite all the places Ixis took them, and the lack of clocks and calendars, her body carries within it a fairly reliable calendar of its own. At least since that first trip through Ixis's sarcophagus.

"They'd probably bring us something now if we ask. They don't intend to mistreat us."

"No."

Not here at the SGC at least. But if there's an NID in this world, she doubts it will be as kind. They're safe from the Ori and the Furlings. Not safe from what these echoes of their own people might try to do to them. It wouldn't bother her so much except for the fact that her mind is filled with secrets she doesn't dare tell.

She goes over to the cabinet on the wall and opens it. It's crammed with things to pass the time for whoever is unlucky enough to be stuck here. Board games. Books. Other random objects left behind by the room's previous inhabitants. There's a television and some videos. She looks over the selection curiously; half of them are training films and PSAs, the other half are ancient action movies. She goes back to the games, picks up one of the decks of cards, turns around. Daniel shakes his head. She brings out the chess set instead.

"I suppose it was lucky for us that he died," she says, taking out the board and laying it down on the table. It looks just like the one she played with Jack on the last occasion she was here, when all of them had Urgo in their heads. She runs her finger over the edge. Same dents. Same scars. "Or... not."

"If he hadn't, maybe we'd actually have found a place that _didn't_ have an SGC," Daniel says, sitting down. His fingers find the same imperfections on the chessboard, tracing them. Remembering.

"Better? Or worse?" she wonders. They both know every word they speak is being heard, recorded, analyzed.

"I don't know," Daniel admits. "If the Stargate had never been opened, the _Goa'uld_ would still rule unchallenged. I wonder... how much this world is like ours?"

 _"I wonder if they'll tell us?"_ her voice has dropped to a whisper, too low for the audio pickups to catch. She's sitting with her back to the cameras; they won't see her lips move.

 _"If they do, it would be an indication of how far they trust us. I'd really like to know how my double died,"_ Daniel answers, equally quietly, lowering his head so that the cameras won't see him speak. "You know, I hope I can talk Janet into letting me get my hair cut soon. I really hate it this long," he adds in a normal voice, beginning to set out the pieces.

"You used to wear it that long. I've seen pictures. And I've seen you with it even longer." Another even more civilian Daniel, his sun-bleached hair pulled back in a ponytail, smiling cheerfully at her. She represses the memory; it ends painfully. _"Do you think they'll let us go?"_  
  
"Not me," Daniel reminds her. Another Daniel Jackson, in another universe. It's an endless source of entertainment, all the variations of Daniel Jackson that she's met. And all of them, somehow, share a core personality, an irreducible essential Daniel-or-Danielle-ness, regardless of the differences of environment or genetics. _"I'm not sure. I'm not sure where we'd go, either."_  
  
"Black or white?" she asks. She has no answer for him. She's so tired of running.

#

A couple of hours after the debriefing O'Neill can't stand it any longer and goes down to Medical.

Carter did the whole 'good soldier' act, but he can tell this has hit her hard. It was bad enough to have to bury Danny. It's almost worse to have him back—a version of him, anyway. Alike enough to remind them all of everything that they've lost.

Frasier doesn't look too surprised to see him come in. Over her shoulder he can see the bank of monitors for Isolation Quarters. Two of the bedrooms have been unsealed for them, and the cameras are on there, but the rooms are empty. They're sitting in the common room, hunched over a chessboard. The room is displayed from several different angles. He can see a couple of meal trays, a coffee carafe.

"Colonel," Frasier says. "I was just about to call General Hammond. The DNA results are back."

"Don't keep me in suspense, Doc," he says, looking away from the bank of monitors.

Frasier smiles faintly. "I don't know whether this is good news or bad news, Colonel, but... you have a match."

"Ah... on _both_ of them? Because...?"

"Aside from the fact that one of them is female, yes. Daniel Jackson is an exact genetic match for Danny. Danielle is as close as possible. They're identical to each other and to Danny."

"What about the sarc thing?"

"No sign of any withdrawal symptoms. They both say they're familiar with them. I've asked them to let me know if they start experiencing anything like that. They've said they will."

He looks at her quizzically. She sighs.

"I have no idea whether they will or not." She nods toward the bank of monitors. "But I should be able to get a pretty good idea. So far they've asked for food, coffee—and Daniel's asked if he could get his hair cut."

"Seems like a reasonable request." Odd, but reasonable. "Anything else?"

Frasier shakes her head, but she looks puzzled. "They haven't really talked all that much. Of course they know they can be heard, and I'm sure they're being careful about what they say, but... they do seem to be communicating. Just watch the screen."

He follows her over to the monitors, and stares down at the screen. They both seem to be intent on the chessboard, but, watching them, he can see what Frasier means. Danielle makes a sweeping gesture, and Daniel nods, smiling. He moves a knight. She reaches across the board to poke him in the shoulder. He shakes his head. It's a whole conversation, except for the part where they actually _say_ anything.

"Are the mikes working?" O'Neill asks.

"Perfectly," she answers. "See?" She gestures to a display at the bottom of the bank. The readout is flashing green. "If they move around, you can hear them, and they were talking earlier. I'd like to run some more tests on them tomorrow. I know it sounds bizarre, but... I almost wonder if they have some form of telepathy."

"Better safe than sorry," O'Neill says absently. "Knock yourself out, Doc."

#

Day two.

He checks in with Frasier first thing. The Jacksons spent a quiet night, though they didn't sleep much. She runs back the security footage. It's all time-stamped. They were up and down all night, in and out of their bedrooms.

"What's on the menu for today?" he asks.

"Every test I can think of." Frasier sighs. "Colonel, do they seem ... odd ... to you?" She realizes what she's said, and grimaces. "I mean—"

"Spooky?" he asks.

"Exactly," she answers with a sigh.

Hard to say. As much spooked as spooky, he thinks. "They've had a rough time," he says. "But don't take any chances."

Frasier nods decisively. On the live feed, the two of them are eating breakfast, talking idly in Spanish. Wondering what time of year it is, and about the weather outside.

#

There's still the actual mission report from P8X-747 to write up. Technically, the mission was a failure, as they didn't get the MALP back. He drops it off in General Hammond's office personally.

"What can I do for you, Colonel?"

"Oh, just ... wondering," he says. Hammond looks harassed.

"So is the Pentagon," he says. "So am I." He taps the pile of folders from Medical on his desk. "Dr. Frasier says she can't find anything out-of-the ordinary about our guests—at least nothing that can't be accounted for by exposure to the sarcophagus. It really doesn't answer the question of what I _do_ with them."

"We've offered refugees sanctuary on Earth before, sir," he reminds Hammond.

"They're not precisely aliens, Colonel. That's our problem. Which one of them am I supposed to say is Dr. Jackson?"

"Both of them, apparently," O'Neill says.

Hammond shakes his head. "And their loyalties?"

"I don't think either of them mean us any harm, sir."

"Unfortunately, that isn't quite enough."

"Why don't I go talk to them?"

"Do that, Colonel. See what you can find out."

#

He goes up to Isolation Quarters; if Hammond has Frasier's reports, they should be back there now. One of the guards cards him through.

They get to their feet as the door opens. Daniel was lying on the couch. Danielle was sitting at the table, constructing an elaborate house of cards.

Daniel's gotten his hair cut. It's military-short now. He looks older. It's oddly disturbing, as if he's in disguise.

Danielle has her glasses on. She blinks at him, frowns, takes them off, rubs her eyes. "They don't work right yet," she complains, as if it's the glasses, and not her eyes, that are changing. Sarcophagus is wearing off.

"Hello, Jack," Daniel says. "Busy day?"

"The usual," he says. "Came to see if you two felt like talking."

"What would you like to talk about?" Danielle asks. She reaches out and touches the cards, and they collapse.

"This and that. Old times. Future plans."

"My future plans involve not being here," Danielle says. She walks over to a chair—one of the upholstered ones—and sits down.

"Yeah, about that. Why?"

"There really isn't any place for us here, is there?" Daniel answers.

O'Neill doesn't answer that directly. He's not quite used to the way that the other side of the conversation bounces back and forth between them, and it just underscores the problem: two Doctor Jacksons, neither of them the one they started out with here. "General Hammond is talking to Washington."

"And you've come to see ... what?" Danielle asks. She sounds honestly puzzled.

"How much cooperation we can expect from you," O'Neill answers.

"Oh, Jack, that depends on what you want," Daniel answers. His tone is gently chiding.

"How about the Quantum Mirror?" he asks, still looking at Danielle.

She simply laughs. Wrong pitch, but the inflection is right; it sends a chill of memory up his spine. _'Oh, don't be an ass, Jack. You're smarter than that.'_

They'd buried Danny, and survived, and moved on, and he feels a dull spark of anger that they're not being left alone to do that. Not Danny's fault, and not these peoples'. But the past isn't staying dead.

He turns toward Daniel. "This Ancient cache?"

Daniel shakes his head.

"We'd like some things too," Danielle suggests.

He glances back toward her. She's still fiddling with her glasses. On—off—on—off. He has the urge to take them away from her.

"Such as?"

"Why don't you sit down?" Daniel says. "I'm pretty sure there's some coffee left."

O'Neill takes a seat at the table. The cards are scattered everywhere. Automatically he begins tidying them, organizing them all back to front and right side up. Daniel fixes him a cup of coffee, not bothering to ask him how he likes it. He realizes that Daniel already knows, or thinks he does.

"Current newspapers," Daniel says, setting the cup down on the table. It's a bizarre non-sequitur, until O'Neill realizes he must be continuing Danielle's sentence: _we'd like some current newspapers._

"And Internet access," Danielle adds.

"Why not just ask for access to the Mainframe while you're at it?" O'Neill suggests.

Danielle smiles. "Pretty sure I don't have the right codes, ah, _here._ And I don't need the SGC Mainframe for the kind of research I need to do."

Danny knew enough about computers to use them for research. Carter knows enough about them to imperil the safety of the Free World. Just because they look like Danny he can't assume they don't have Carter's skills. Nobody's going to let them near the Internet.

"Which would be?" he says anyway.

"Has Sammy talked your ear off about alternate universes yet?" Danielle asks.

He's getting used to their non-answers, but that doesn't mean he likes them. Apparently Danielle called Carter 'Sammy' back where she came from. O'Neill wonders if Carter'd liked it. Danny had called her Sam—except of course when he called her 'Samantha,' and then it was every man—and Jaffa—for himself.

"She's been writing down a lot of numbers." He sips his coffee. It's exactly right.

"We'd just like to know some things about this one," Danielle says. "It looks just the same, but your past history could be different. I told you mine, and you didn't contradict it, but ... you didn't confirm that it matched yours, either."

"You're not going to find the history of the Stargate Program in the _Denver Post,"_ he points out. Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle with the glasses. She's got her feet up on the chair. Head down. Talking to her knees.

"Maybe not," she agrees. "But there will be a lot of things to indicate the general direction of the history of the 20th Century. Of course, Internet access would allow me to do more in-depth research."

"To find out stuff you already know," O'Neill says guardedly.

"To find out if it's the same, or close. Um, for example, when was President Kennedy assassinated?"

"November 22, 1963. That's no secret."

The glasses are off again. "In mine, too, and Daniel's. So we know that matches. But I went to one universe—it looked just like this, there'd been a 'Danielle' there, she hadn't been on SG-1, but she'd died anyway during a Foothold situation—and it took me four days to realize that there Kennedy had served two full terms and they were in the middle of World War Three."

It sounds like science fiction, but not impossible. He'd been ten during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everybody'd been sure the war would start right then. They couldn't have gone the ABC route in the world she's talking about, though, or there wouldn't have been a Stargate Command 35 years later.

"Why weren't you on SG-1?" O'Neill asks, and Daniel snorts derisively. He's obviously heard this story before.

"Well... Sammy wasn't either. And Janet wasn't the CMO. Apparently equal rights for women were going to have to wait until Soviet Russia was a radioactive cinder."

"Okay, that's officially weird." He wonders how they got the Gate open without Dr. Jackson or Captain Carter. No, she said her counterpart had died in a 'Foothold' situation, so she must have been at the SGC. Maybe Carter was too. But not on SG-1. He wonders how he survived there, without a Carter and a Danny to save his ass.

Danielle looks up at the ceiling as if it's fascinating. He realizes she's staring into one of the security cameras, speaking to it instead of him.

"Not the weirdest. The weirdest one I just talked to for about half an hour and then ran like hell."

O'Neill regards her. She's staring off into space, now, remembering. "Each time I'd arrive in a new universe, I'd find out whether I could survive there, and then—at first—dial the Gate for home. If I was still alive there, my GDO worked. If I was dead, it didn't. I managed to hang onto it—or replace it—at least at first. So this one time I dialed the Gate, sent my code, tried my radio and there was nothing—which was weird, since I'd gotten a lock and I was pretty sure the radio was working. The GDO wasn't responding properly, so I was assuming my counterpart was dead, and I had no desire to go walking into the iris, so I kept trying. Finally, after about twenty minutes, I got a response—in German—from someone identifying himself as _Obergruppenfuhrer_ West of _Projekt Tür zum Himmel_ and demanding I identify myself at once."

 _Tür zum Himmel._ His German is good enough for that. 'Heaven's Door.'

"Sounds like the Germans won the war," O'Neill says.

"Oh, ya think?" Danielle demands mockingly. "I switched to German, but the damage was already done. West demanded my name, my location, my racial identification code, and to know how I'd gotten through the Heaven's Door without authorization. I thought they couldn't find me, but I wasn't quite sure; and I'd already told them my name and mentioned Stargate Command and SG-1."

"Careless of you," O'Neill says mildly.

Her head whips around and she stares at him, and for a moment he almost expects a blast of temper. But company manners prevail, and she smiles instead.

"I do a lot of stupid things," she says quietly, looking away again. "Anyway, a bunch of people relying so heavily on Budge were a bunch of people I really didn't want to talk to, so I turned off my radio and headed for the Mirror again."

He's not completely sure that he gets the reference. Budge was an Egyptologist that Danny'd never had a good word for—no feud like an academic feud, even if one of the guys is dead at the time—and when he'd been West's XO—a different West, and it's just screwy to think of _Obergruppenfuhrer_ West.

"So now you want to know if we're all gonna start ... saluting and goose-stepping?"

"I'd like to see that," Daniel mutters, just loud enough for him to hear.

"We want to know as much about this universe as we can, Jack. You would, if it were you. Especially about the parts of it that we ... knew." Her voice flattens on the last word.

It’s true enough that he'd want to know. But his job is to assess strategic weakness and to apply pressure to the advantage of his superiors, and what he knows is that he's found something they want. Balancing conscience and necessity became second nature to him about the time Danny's parents died.

"Well, I could probably make a good case to General Hammond that it wouldn't do any particular harm. We'd expect a little cooperation in return, though," he says.

"Oh," Daniel says, innocently enough, "you can certainly expect a _little_ cooperation."

#

Day Three.

General Hammond has given SG-1 the go-ahead to compare notes with the Jackson Twins. Mostly in hopes of clearing up some old puzzles in their own files by getting the Looking Glass Land version of various missions. But partly, O'Neill knows, the Pentagon—and therefore Hammond, because he has his orders—wants to get its sticky little hands on the Mirror and that Ancient weapons cache—if it _is_ a weapons cache—and hopes that by telling them a bit of what they want to know, they can build trust.

He doubts it, himself. But hey, pizza.

#

He brings in the stack of pizzas; Carter brings Danny's favorite cake, because the smart money's on its being their guests' favorite, too. They can't manage to sneak any wine onto the base, but Teal'c gets one of the _big_ thermoses out of the Commissary and it's filled with the good stuff. Nyan's been excused from this little party; he didn't know Danny as long as the rest of them did, and he's painfully bad at bluffing. O'Neill hopes there won't be any cause for it today, but he doesn't rule it out.

Part of him already trusts them both as much as he would have trusted Danny, but he's neither deaf nor crazy. He's been listening to them talk. If they're not desperate, they're close. Part of being a good leader is not giving those under you the latitude to make obvious mistakes—the kind that kill them, not the kind they learn from. He knows his people won't get what Washington is after, but anything they _can_ get will strengthen General Hammond's position. And theirs. If that means he has to lie to the Jacksons, he will.

To protect them.

When an airman lets him, Carter, and Teal'c in to their quarters, Daniel's playing chess—against himself, because Danielle's in the corner juggling. They're both wearing their glasses again. Daniel held out longer than Danielle against putting his glasses back on. O'Neill thinks that may just have been stubbornness.

"Jack?" Daniel says. The short hair still looks funny.

"And he's brought pizza. And Sammy," Danielle adds.

"Which means he wants something," Daniel finishes.

"Or wants to tell us things," Danielle suggests.

"You think?" Daniel asks.

"Jack?" Danielle answers in tones of mock disbelief.

"Still, it's nice to see Sam and Teal'c again," Daniel finishes, smiling at Carter. He doesn't look much like Danny any more, except when he smiles.

"Actually, General Hammond was hoping you'd be willing to tell us more about the reality in your original universes," Carter says. "He's hoping we might be able to clear up a few of the mysteries that we have here."

The two of them look at each other, and O'Neill knows they're taking a meeting. It's more than a little spooky, but Frasier's had them both hooked up to every machine in the book, and she swears they aren't telepathic.

"Maybe something more in the nature of a sort of... mutual information exchange?" Daniel asks guardedly. "Possibly you could explain to us in more detail how your history had gone so that we could tell you how ours had differed."

It isn't really a requirement. What Daniel really wants to know is how far they're going to trust them. Whether they're guests, or prisoners. O'Neill looks at Danielle. The expression on her face as she looks at Carter and Teal'c is wistful. It's familiar and unsettling, because it's the way you look at the dead.

"And maybe you'd tell us, uh, what, uh, _when_ it is here. How long the SGC has been running. What's your next mission. What was your last one. We could answer some of your questions, but you'd have to answer our questions, too. Without—" Danielle shrugs apologetically "—lying to us."

"Hey," O'Neill says. "That's why we brought T. You know he can't lie."

"In fact, I am perfectly capable of misrepresenting the truth, O'Neill," Teal'c says, sounding a little miffed.

"But you won't lie," Danielle says earnestly. "Because it's important for you not to know your future."

This is new. Carter implied that the Mirrors should only be able to send you sideways, not forward and back. She glances at him, and he nods slightly.

"We agree," Carter says. "We don't want to know the future. Just the past."

"Pizza first," O'Neill says.

#

Right about the cake. Only half right on the pizza, though. Danielle dives right in to the shrimp and pineapple—Danny's favorite—when the boxes are opened. Daniel looks at her as if she's gone crazy and suddenly O'Neill is in a turf-war over his extra-cheese Meatza.

#

"Oh, god, I missed pizza," Daniel groans, sitting back with a sigh about half an hour later.

"Coffee. _Good_ coffee. Chocolate-" That's Danielle, eyeing the cake.

 _"Antihistamines,"_ they say in chorus.

The two of them look at him expectantly.

"You first," Daniel says.

"Carter? Help me out here. We've been running this thing what? Six years?"

"Yes, sir. In 1994, the Giza Project was organized under Catherine Langford to decipher the Coverstone that had been found on the Giza Plateau in 1928. In February, 1996, Dr. Daniel Jackson joined the project, deciphering the Coverstone and allowing the Stargate to be activated. He went to Abydos with the First Abydos Mission, returning in March, 1997. He joined SG-1 to look for his missing wife and brother-in-law, remaining with the Program until his death in 2001. That was, ah, a little over a year ago." She clears her throat. "Sorry."

Danny died in May of 2001. It's August of 2002 now.

"I'm sorry —Sam," Danielle says, stumbling just a little over the name. Carter waves off Danielle's awkward attempt at sympathy. Carter's too good a soldier not to have done her best to move on, but sometimes a year isn't that long.

The next question—the obvious question—hangs in the air of the room. He can tell that they don't want to ask, but they're trying to figure out ... something.

"Danny died in a Jaffa ambush on P2X-463. We were bushwhacked on the way to the Gate. He didn't make it. We got his body back," O'Neill says.

Danielle looks down, biting her lip. She glances sideways at Daniel. "And you got back, and found out that General Hammond had been blackmailed into resigning by the Trust. And General Bauer was assigned to the SGC," she says. It isn't a question.

"That's right," O'Neill says. That matches. And Carter'd come home from Danny's funeral to find out she was building bombs. O'Neill's team was gone, and he'd come _this_ _close_ to following Hammond into retirement and letting Bauer take the whole SGC down around them all.

Neither Daniel nor Danielle says the obvious: that they made it home alive from 463, both of them.

"So it's June now?" Daniel asks.

"It is, in fact, August," Teal'c says.

"August 14th," O'Neill adds. Just in case that matters.

"August 14th, 2002," Danielle says. She looks as if she's inspecting the date from all angles: past, present, _future..._  
  
"Okay," Daniel says, drawing out the word. "I guess we're good to go."

#

They're still cautious, and there are as many differences between Daniel and Danielle's universes, apparently, as between theirs and O'Neill's. A lot of things are the same, though. The death of Ra. The raid on Abydos.

Their best guess as to why the _Goa'uld_ fleet imploded in the Solar System a few years back is a little Fifth Column action on Master Bra'tac's part. In both their universes, he'd gotten his old job back—First Prime to Apophis—which they know because their SG-1s got the address for Apophis's battle-fleet from yet another Alternate Universe and Gated on-board Crown Prince Klorel's ship before it started toward Earth. They rescued Bra'tac, blew up the ships, escaped in death-gliders, same-old same-old. Here, they're guessing Master Bra'tac followed his original plan, and got Apophis and Klorel to fight each other, so Pops is probably dead.

And Skaara is probably dead too. He was Klorel's host.

"It'd be nice to know for sure," O'Neill sighs.

"Maybe the Tok'ra—" Carter says.

"Oh, sure, we can ask. But do they ever call, do they ever write?"

"Did... I'm sorry. Did Danny ever see his wife again? After Apophis's ships were destroyed?" Daniel asks.

O'Neill hesitates. It's an odd question, but Daniel must have a reason for asking. "About nine months after our big light-show, he went home to Abydos to tell Kasuf he was still searching for Sha're, and he'd never give up. Kasuf told him Sha're had come through the Gate a few months before, pregnant." O'Neill stops. "Kasuf'd had her buried alive, because he knew her child was fathered by a demon."

"Oh, god," Daniel says, covering his face. Danielle puts a hand on his shoulder.

"We brought her body back to Earth. Danny wanted to, Kasuf didn't mind. Frasier said she was still snaked."

He'd told Danny—he'd told himself—that Kasuf had killed a _Goa'uld._ Not Sha're. He'd tried to believe it enough for both of them.

Daniel sighs heavily. "The... Amonet—the _Goa'uld_ that took her—had to sleep while she was pregnant. It was the only way the child could be born. It was Apophis's child. A _harceisis."_

"The creation of such creatures is forbidden," Teal'c says disapprovingly. "The penalty is death."

Daniel just shrugs.

#

They finish the coffee and most of the cake. He's getting pretty good at charting the 'no-fly' zones now; any time they start to get close to one, there's a sudden upsurge of Stereo Danny; other than that, the two of them keep to the point, giving O'Neill and Carter pretty much what they're looking for. They even get a few Gate addresses, too: Abydos, Velona, Argos, Cimmeria, the Land of Light, Heliopolis. They're the same as the ones they already know. He keeps his end of the bargain, too, letting them cross-check their worlds with his. They're looking for something. He wonders what it is.

There are missions they've never been on here, people they've never met; at least they have a few new places to look for answers to old questions based on talking to the Mirror Twins. Kheb—so Teal'c says—is a Jaffa myth, but Daniel's apparently been there, though (of course) he won't give them the address.

They get off that subject really fast.

Carter was taken by Jolinar in both Daniel and Danielle's universes, and Jolinar died. Here, Frasier was taken and escaped with Jolinar to the Tok'ra. Convinced Jolinar to jump hosts and send her back, and that's how they met the _good_ snakes.

Brain-eating wall mirror and a visit to the Asgard? Nope. They chased the little grey guys around the Galaxy for almost a year before catching up with them in 'The Hall of Thor's Might,' where Danny did some of his best sweet-talking. The Asgard have been pretty friendly since then.

Danielle tells them that the Ancient Repository was a 'zero-sum game' and they don't need to know where it is.

And then there's the real joker in the deck.

P3X-4C3 was considered a diplomatic mission. SG-8 went instead of SG-1, about three months ago. They never came back.

"Ah, Kelowna, scenic Kelowna," Danielle says bitterly.

"How many times did you die there?" Daniel asks her.

"I've lost count. You?"

"Only once, but it was ... memorable," Daniel says.

They're back to Stereo Danny, and air in the room is suddenly charged.

"I'm sorry?" Carter says. "You—both—went to 4C3. And _died?"_

"Oh yeah," Daniel says. "And I think this is the actual place where your universe splits off from anything we recognize. Because if neither of us—or your Dr. Jackson—goes to Kelowna—"

"No Ori," Danielle says.

"No Furlings," Daniel says.

And apparently, no Kelowna, because if Here matches There-Times-Two—and despite their differences, their universes seem to match each other more closely than they match this one—the Kelownans had their own Giant Economy Size Manhattan Project going, and SG-8 and most of the planet—and the Stargate—is pretty much gone now. Which explains why the SGC hasn't been able to dial in since.

"Can we stop now?" Danielle asks quietly.

"I would _really_ like a drink," Daniel says.

NORAD has an O Club, actually, but it's not like SGC personnel can just drop in upstairs for a quick one. The SGC isn't supposed to be down here in NORAD's basement. It would cause talk. And there's no liquor in the SGC, except for the emergency bottle in Hammond's desk.

"I'm pretty sure General Hammond will let me sign the two of you out of here overnight," O'Neill says, coming to a decision. "Vital to your continuing cooperation, and stuff. Who knows what you might say when you're drunk?"

That wins him identical patronizing smiles, and that's better than the looks they get when they talk about the Ori. Or the Furlings. Or—just now—Kelowna.

#

They walk into his house as if they're moving into enemy territory. Daniel is tense and Danielle is white around the mouth, her eyes wide and dark. He'd thought coming here would be better, but for some reason, it isn't.

"Drinks first, or tour?" he asks breezily.

While he was sweet-talking Hammond, Carter found them a couple of flight-bags for their overnight gear; they look like a pair of hitch-hiking students.

He'd thought of sending Danielle home with Carter. It would have been reasonable; girls together. Even started to make the suggestion. Hadn't gotten all the way through the sentence before Danielle had gone very still and Daniel had looked as if O'Neill were offering to have him shot instead. So he'd turned the sentence into something else and they'd relaxed and he's got one more unanswered question to add to the pile.

"Tour," Danielle says, looking at the pictures on the wall. Sara. Charlie. Sha're. "And then I hope you have Scotch."

"Oh yeah," he says. If she drinks Scotch, he wonders what Daniel drinks, because Danny hated the hard stuff and wouldn't touch it. Had no head for booze at all. "C'mon."

#

The house isn't that big, but he shows them over all of it except the room above the garage. They need the distraction, though he isn't sure from what. He wonders if either of them likes hockey.

They're entertained—and unsurprised—by O'Neill's Legendary Junk Room. He wonders, just a little, about all those other 'hims.' The ones Daniel and Danielle knew. Thinking about that makes his brain hurt, though, so he stops. Daniel unbends enough to tell him that he should _really_ move into the 21st century and turn in his turntable system for a CD player.

"Never going to happen. And this is the guest room."

He opens the door. It needs airing, but the sheets are clean.

Danielle walks in first, and Daniel follows, and suddenly he's kicking himself; too focused on managing both of them to think of what this would look like.

He should have gotten rid of everything after Danny died. He got rid of a lot— Carter helped—but there are a few pieces left here. Mostly on the walls; those damned hoodoo masks Danny liked so much; O'Neill had said that if Danny was going to collect them he had to put them in here where O'Neill would never have to see them.

Too late now. Brazen it out.

Danielle sets her bag down on the bed and walks over to the dresser. It's still covered with odds and ends of things; some cheap and tacky, some probably worth as much as O'Neill's truck. Danny used to spend half his paychecks on that crap.

There's that board game—Seneca? Something like that—and an old clay statue lying near the edge. Egyptian. She picks up the statue.

"These are my..." she stops.

"—things," Daniel finishes the sentence. He reaches out and runs a finger over the top of an alabaster box. Broken, but Danny had bought it anyway.

They look at each other, then at him.

"He lived here. This was his room," O'Neill says. As explanations go, it's not much of one, but it's all he intends to give.

Danielle sets down the statuette. He's forgotten what Danny used to call it. He remembers it was something you were supposed to bury with the dead and he hadn't quite been able to bring himself to do it. He wasn't sure if it was something Danny would have wanted, anyway, though it would have been simple to arrange. It was a closed casket funeral.

"Okay," she says neutrally. "That's ... different."

"It's all right?" Daniel asks, cocking his head and turning back to look at him. "Us staying here?"

"It's just a guest room now."

#

They leave their bags behind and follow him back into the living room again. Drinks all round. O'Neill has beer and Danielle has Scotch and Daniel's going to go with beer too until Danielle tells O'Neill that he's actually a wine drinker and O'Neill remembers that there are a couple of bottles left in the rack in the garage that he didn't get around to giving away, so Daniel opens one of those and the two of them get just a little bit ... relaxed.

There's not much in the way of food in the house besides chips, but the Chinese place delivers, and Chinese is another thing both of them have missed.

#

It's been a long day. He feels an oddly-familiar sense of accomplishment at having gotten them fed and settled; they're both in good shape, but they still give the impression of being starved. Starving for things other than food, that much is clear. Pounced on his pile of old newspapers. Even read the comics.

That debriefing today obviously stirred up some bad memories. They all know it won't be the last one. Six years of mission files to go through. They only hit the high points today. Even leaving aside the growing list of things they're refusing to talk about, what they can tell them is going to be both useful, and not useful enough. After today he's certain that even if they wanted to, they couldn't provide schematics or a wiring diagram or detailed technical knowledge of any alien machine. It's a problem for another day, though.

Right now he's watching a game on the bigscreen—Danielle was stunned to discover that he had TiVO—sprawled on the couch beside Daniel, who's doing a certain amount of sprawling himself. He'll be off the couch and onto the floor in another few inches, and O'Neill envies the flexibility of spine that can permit Daniel to hold such a position in comfort. The door to the deck is open, letting in night air and the sound of crickets and the occasional yap of a faraway dog. Danielle is sitting on the floor between them, and though she's taken it slow, it's been three _very_ stiff Scotches since she got here, so her head is leaning against O'Neill's knee. She's far from drunk though. Just relaxed. For the first time, he thinks, since she got here. Not to the house—to Earth.

O'Neill's arm is spread across the back of the couch behind Daniel's head. If Daniel moved up, if O'Neill moved down, they'd touch.

He lifts his arm away, pats Danielle on the head to rouse her, turns off the television with the remote.

"Bedtime."

They sit up, yawning and stretching, and start the inevitable argument over who sleeps on the couch.

"Oh, for god's sake," O'Neill says, caught between exasperation and amusement. He's figured things out several hours ago; they way they touch, and the way they don't touch. It's a language he's fluent in. "It's a double bed."

One owner, very low mileage.

Danielle looks up at him, surprised but smiling, and O'Neill knows without a single word being said that it would be easy to send Daniel off to the guest bedroom alone.

And nobody would sleep on the couch.

"We thought you—" she begins.

"Go to bed, kids," he says, getting to his feet.

He doesn't want to think of all the ways that sentence could end.

_Might mind?_

_Might like to join us?_

#

"Oh, that—"

"—could have been awkward?" Dani finishes, as she shuts the guestroom door behind her.

"I just hope he isn't planning on putting this in his report to General Hammond," Daniel says, looking around the room and trying to imagine a universe in which he and Jack were roommates. It was true that he'd lived with Jack for a couple of weeks after coming back from Abydos (Dani hadn't; she'd stayed in on-Base quarters, but they'd both moved into the same apartment at about the same time.) He wonders if, here, he just ... stayed.

"No," she says decisively. "If he were going to tell, he wouldn't let it happen."

"'Don't Ask, Don't Tell?'" Daniel suggests. He's surprised to find he can still be bitter about something like that, when he's seen entire space time continua crumble into flaming ruin around him. Sometimes it's the little things that continue to hurt.

"Words that I live by," Dani says. She means something different than he does, but similar, the way she herself is different but similar. By the end—but before the Furlings—she was living a lie as much as he was. _The U.S. Air Force: the love that dares not speak its name..._  
  
"Come to bed," Daniel says.

#

There are nightclothes—infirmary scrubs—in the overnight bags, but neither of them bothers with them. They set their boots neatly in the corner, fold their green military fatigues and tuck them into one of the empty drawers of the dresser. In the bed, their bodies fit together with the ease of long practice, skin on skin, interlocking like the details of their pasts.

"I think I'm a little ripped," Dani says, pressing her forehead against his shoulder. He closes his arms around her, feeling unscarred skin.

Even after a year together, the things she says can still surprise him. Sometimes it's like listening to himself. Sometimes, like hearing a weird version of Jack. The first time it happened he'd thought she was mocking him, but it's just the way she is. More like Jack than he is. Or was. He thinks, by the end, he might have become like Jack himself. Looking for weapons and more than willing to kill, though reducing Jack to such a simplistic equation is doing a disservice to his dearest friend. It had been Jack's job to see one side of the problem, his to see the other.

Sometimes he wonders how Jack died, back in his world. Did they blow the Mountain? Did a Prior come there, offering them salvation through Origin? He knows Jack would never have considered it. There was a time he thought he wouldn't have either. _Every man has his price._

What happens when you find out what yours is, and they won't let you pay it? He'd even killed himself once; at least he'd gotten pretty close. Anything to stop the slaughter of innocents. A Prior had saved his life. All hail the Ori.

"I think we both had enough to drink," he says.

"You didn't even finish that bottle of wine," she says.

He strokes her back. It's good to be able to touch her again, knowing they aren't on display. They aren't free, aren't safe, but this is an improvement. He's learned to take what he can get. At least he didn't have to watch his friends—or variations of them—die, over and over and over again.

"I'm a cheap date," he says.

"Everyone says so," she agrees. Her voice is blurred with approaching sleep, but it's all right. They aren't safe, but this is a safe place. At least for right now.

#

In the middle of the night she wakes him. Thrashing. On her way to a full-blown nightmare; one of the bad ones. It was one of the reasons Ixis kept them caged together after the first few weeks. Neither of them sleeps well any more, but Dani wakes up screaming. He knows what to do by now; he gets his arms around her—so she can't hit him—and hugs her hard until the pressure wakes her.

There's never any telling what she'll say when she first wakes up, in what language, or who she'll call for, if she does. Some names he recognizes, some he doesn't. Once it was Jonas. Sometimes it's him. Just as often it's Jack.

"Ixis?" she says.

Well, that's new. "All gone," he says. "Awake?"

He feels her nod. "Sorry," she whispers.

"It's all right."

They've kept each other alive for a year now. The only ones who could understand, or offer any measure of forgiveness. Helping each other back toward sanity. He doesn't know if this is love—it really doesn't feel like it—but he knows they need each other. They're bound together. Fused, by genetics and history and loss.

Janet had wondered if they were telepathic, but it's simply that they know each other better than anyone else ever could. Though Jack had come close. _Tanist to the Sacred King,_ he thinks, and wonders which of them he's casting in which role.

If this Jack is like the one—the ones—they left behind, there may be trouble. Lying to him, fooling him, will be nearly impossible, and Daniel knows that Jack will put the team, will put Earth— _his_ Earth—first. He needs to understand that the way to do that is to trust them. Some things are better left alone.

A lesson Daniel learned too late.

"There's no one here," Dani says, tracing her fingers over his skin. They're soft, unmarked. She had calluses once. So did he.

He knows what she's asking for, and what he wants.

"Jack's down the hall."

"He won't hear if we're careful."

"I can be careful."

"And Janet gave me the implant, so I don't have to be."

He stops for a moment, in the middle of shifting position, and realizes she's right. She could get pregnant now. Or could have. "Do I want to know how you talked her into that?"

"I told her I lusted after Sgt. Siler. No. It's standard procedure for the teams, you know; I asked her to give me one during the GYN, I said if we did get to leave I'd feel better if I was ... covered." She presses her face against his neck. Not a kiss. Not yet.

"And you are."

"We are."

"Good."

"Also, I might have to seduce General Hammond."

It's only a joke because it's improbable. They've spent their bodies like currency. So often they were all anyone wanted. Their other skills, their mastery of dozens of languages of Earth, their knowledge of the Stargate, all useless. Or dangerous to expose. She was the first one to do it, convincing him it was worth it. That staying alive was worth it.

"Never happen." He kisses her cheek, then her mouth.

"I think that I—"

"—talk too much."

So she stops.

#

In the middle of the night the sounds wake him. They're being very quiet, and the door is closed, but his is open and he's always been a light sleeper.

When is it voyeurism, and when is it gathering vital intelligence?

He puts on his robe and goes out into the hall. He knows every place where the floor creaks, and avoids them.

The faint rustling of the mattress is the giveaway. It isn't loud, so they think its safe to stay on the bed instead of risking the dusty floor, but the sound is rhythmic. Rhythmic noises are unnatural, and draw the attention when louder erratic ones won't. He hears a gasp, and then a flurry of whispering; he can't make out the words, but the sounds of sibilants will carry for miles.

He goes back to his room.

How long since they've had this combination of safety and privacy? Can't do this in Isolation Quarters. They didn't even try to sleep together there.

He lies in his bed and stares at the ceiling. He won't think about the specifics of their captivity. They won't talk about it, other than to say that it's over, and the sarcophagus has erased every mark. What really bothers him on some level is that it honestly doesn't seem to have made all that much of an _impression_ on them _._ They've obviously seen worse. It's not bravado. They're jaded.

But they're here now, back in the land of pizza, beer, and hockey. There's got to be a way to make the endgame come out right.

Before he sleeps, O'Neill thinks of a mirror that can change reality, that will let you step through into another world you might like better. One where friends and lovers are still alive, or exist in unimaginable versions of themselves.

Even with the biggest telescope you can't count all the stars in the universe. He wonders how it would feel to know you were the sole survivor, to _believe,_ deep inside, that no one else was left. And then to look at someone else's face and know it was yours. Would you fall in love?

#

In the morning, someone's in the kitchen cooking; he can tell by the sounds and the smells, so he doesn't move from the bed. He realizes he heard sounds in the house earlier—probably an hour or so ago—and dismissed them as normal and familiar, not worth waking all the way up for. _Things like that will cost you,_ he tells himself, as the scent of coffee joins that of bacon and—he strongly suspects—waffles. The people in the house with him are, in the most telling sense, strangers. He's not supposed to trust them. He does, though.

It occurs to him, after a few minutes of listening, that there was nothing in the house to make breakfast with last night, and where they got the makings of breakfast becomes a question interesting enough to get him out of bed.

They're both in the kitchen. Daniel has raided the dryer for civilian clothes. So has she, in fact; she's wearing one of O'Neill's flannel shirts over an old t-shirt of his, and the combo comes to mid-thigh. Maybe Carter can take them shopping later.

She's standing at the counter washing and hulling strawberries—they've definitely been out of the house—while Daniel presides over the waffle iron—he was right about the waffles—and a skillet full of bacon. The scent of coffee is stronger. Not drip or instant. They've found the percolator and set it up.

"You didn't go out dressed like that," he says, sitting down at the dinette.

Danielle stops hulling strawberries and reaches into the cupboard for a mug. The shirt-and-t-shirt ride up, but she's still more-thoroughly-covered than she was on 747.

"I stayed in the truck."

She pours coffee and sets the mug in front of him, goes to the refrigerator for milk.

"And the money?"

Because while there's a spare key to the truck in the garage, his wallet's in his pants pocket, and he knows neither of them came into his bedroom.

"You always keep an emergency fifty in the ashtray," Daniel says. "I figured you wouldn't mind."

"So you stole my money and my truck," O'Neill says calmly, spooning sugar into his coffee. If Hammond finds out, the three of them are dead.

"We brought back the truck," Danielle says.

"And you're getting breakfast out of the deal," Daniel finishes serenely. "Don't push your luck."

All three of them have pushed their luck until it broke.

#

After breakfast—bacon, and fresh-squeezed _organic_ orange juice; real maple syrup, heavy cream, imported strawberries, and the coffee's Jamaican, so he isn't expecting much change from that fifty—O'Neill calls Carter. Daniel and Danielle need clothes, and Support and Supply is Major Carter's department. By the time she arrives, Danielle is back in her military-issue; it's the only thing she has that fits.

He figures they'll want to go out together—they didn't want to be split up yesterday—but apparently things are different this morning. Daniel doesn't want to go to the Mall. Danielle says she knows his sizes. The women go off on a hunt-and-gather expedition, promising to be back ... eventually.

Leaving O'Neill alone with Daniel.

There are the usual weekend chores; laundry, cleaning, some piled-up paperwork. The electric bill still has to be paid even if you spend your days saving the universe. After that, Daniel actually nags him into more grocery-shopping, one chore O'Neill hates, but if he's going to have company, he'd better be able to feed it. He's called Hammond and checked in. No mention of the little field-trip; he hasn't decided whether to report that at all, and if he does, it can wait until they're back under lock and key again. No sense upsetting the General.

When they get back from the store, it's noon. No sign of Carter and Danielle yet. Daniel makes sandwiches while O'Neill puts away the rest of the groceries.

Yardwork's next. Something he likes to do himself, when he can; the rest of the time, there's a service.

Daniel's willing to help, which doesn't actually surprise him. He gets the new superlight push-mower out of the garage, and Daniel cuts the grass (least stress on his allergies) while O'Neill weeds and prunes; those roses are going to start taking small dogs hostage if he doesn't do something about them soon. At the end of two hours, most of the work is done and he figures they've both earned a beer or two.

Besides, there's something that's been bugging him. Questions go down better with beer.

Including the questions Daniel hasn't asked.

#

"Why didn't you tell him you were SG-1 after he captured you? Dial home? Get ransomed?" O'Neill asks.

Daniel looks sideways at him, then away. They're standing on the deck drinking beer. Daniel has all of Danny's allergies, and summer is the season for roses—the worst for him—but he's also got Little Napoleon looking after him now, so he's fine out here, even after cutting the grass. Still a shock to see a beer in Daniel's hand, though. Even more of a shock to see him on his second one and still coherent.

"We didn't want to tell him anything. Although he really didn't want to know much. Our names. Our planet of origin. Our relationship to each other. Whether we'd ever been sick; injuries, so on. What talents we had. When we found out he'd never heard of the _Tau'ri,_ we figured we'd managed to find a reality where Earth never discovered its Stargate, or at least one where whichever of us had been born here had died without opening it, so there was no point in letting him know we knew anything more about the _chappa'ai_ than we had to. Then you showed up."

Daniel doesn't sound happy about it.

"What? Not glad to see me?" O'Neill says, and Daniel looks at him again, rolling the longneck back and forth between his palms in an edgy gesture. They're both stripped to the waist; he took one look at Daniel's skin when Daniel took off his shirt and went inside for the sunblock; Daniel is pale as winter. Even covered in SPF Two Million, SGC Issue, he'd better go inside soon.

Despite every cue of sound and scent and temperature, it takes constant deliberate attention for O'Neill to keep himself grounded in the seasons these days, with so many trips spinning through the Stargate. One step and it's summer, winter, spring, fall; the end of the world; the beginning of Time. But here on Irvington Court in Colorado Springs it's an August afternoon; the air is hot and sharp at the same time, courtesy of the altitude; the fresh-cut grass has that thick green smell that you ought to be able to put in a bowl and eat; the roses smell like honey, and there's just a breath of breeze. O'Neill leans his forearms on the deckrail and feels the sun beat into his bare shoulders as he looks out over the yard, looking away from Daniel.

"You never were as dumb as you liked to pretend you were, Jack. By now I'm one of the two living experts on Jack O'Neill. You can stop trying to coax me around."

"Yeah, well, if you're so smart, why play dumb? If you know me, you know there was no way I was going to leave you there."

"I told you—"

 _"Daniel_ , if you tell me one more time you would have been _'fine'_ I'm gonna hit you. So you'd escape. Maybe. What about before that? Do you think your new owner was going to have you just serving _tea?"_

"It wouldn't be anything new for either of us," Daniel says quietly, gazing at the butchered roses across the lawn.

O'Neill doesn't ask; Daniel's implication is quite clear.

 _It's a risk of the job,_ Danny said to him once. _For me, for Sam, even for you. I pity the guy who tries it on Teal'c, though._ Making a joke about it while they still could. Though the four of them had joked about grimmer things together before the end. Apocalypse and genocide. Black holes and extinction events. Plague and alien Terminators.

"You did what you had to do to stay alive," O'Neill says, putting a hand on Daniel's shoulder, feeling the greasiness of sunblock, the slipperiness of sweat. "Sometimes that's all you can do."

"I remind you of him," Daniel says, not moving.

"Not after last night," O'Neill says before he thinks, lifting his hand away and rubbing his fingers together. Because Daniel is tense and wary again, and he's not sure why; if O'Neill could chase the confused association Daniel's face is creating in his mind all the way back to its source, it would be to thunderheads in the sky building toward a storm; and a joke is always a good way to defuse the tension.

Daniel has the grace not to play the fool.

"I'm not like him because I slept with Dani," he says.

The name jars O'Neill for a moment; then he remembers. Daniel calls Danielle 'Dani.'

"Danny was gay," O'Neill says. It isn't, after all, a secret.

Danny was terrified, in the beginning, that it would _matter._ Not that he'd cared what people thought of him, not that way, but he'd had some vague understanding that the U.S. Military cared, and back when he'd come back from Abydos, he'd been desperate not to be shut out of the search for Sha're and Skaara.

They'd given Sha're to Danny as a bride on Abydos. When he'd confessed to her—as soon as he'd been able to _talk_ to her—that he could never be a husband to her, she had kissed him and told him he would always be her husband, but that, with his permission, she would take Skaara as a husband as well, when Skaara was old enough. It would have been a traditional marriage for the royal house of Abydos.

He'd loved both of them and never touched either one.

Danny told O'Neill all that—and more—his first night back. He was never able—then or later—to hold his liquor.

And so O'Neill had pointed out to General Hammond, to Major Samuels, to all the Pentagon brass that hovered around the Program, that gay, straight, or bright green, Dr. Jackson was not only already up to his eyes in the non-disclosure agreements that he'd already signed to translate the Coverstone in the first place, but that no one— _no one_ —could do the vital work he did beyond the Stargate.

"I'm not," Daniel answers calmly. "But I'm cheerful."

O'Neill stares at him blankly. Daniel meets his gaze and smiles, a little sadly. "Old joke. I guess it isn't very funny."

"You're saying you swing both ways?" O'Neill says. If they're going to talk about things like this, they have to be clear.

"I used to. I got married."

"Were you a good husband?"

It isn't the response Daniel's expecting; he looks surprised. "I tried to be. Not good enough to keep her from being taken. And then she died."

In a different way than she died here, obviously, but dead is dead.

"Daniel—" O'Neill says, because he thinks he knows where this conversation is going. He'd had it with Danny, who'd wept and raged and sworn at his inability to save the woman he'd loved as dearly as a sister.

But it doesn't.

"He lived here," Daniel says suddenly, gesturing back toward the house. "Danny." He raises his eyebrows, and the question – unspoken—that O'Neill has been expecting is there.

"It was for security reasons," O'Neill says, knowing that Daniel will guess the rest of the truth. "Because of his sexual preferences, Dr. Jackson was considered a potential security risk who needed to be kept under constant observation. But he was vital to the Stargate Program."

"And you loved him," Daniel says.

Daniel says it so easily—the thing nobody was allowed to say or even think, before Danny's death or after it, or SG-1's house of cards would all come toppling down. O'Neill had carried Danny's love like another penance for Charlie, trying to tell himself that Danny was in the field only until they found Sha're, found Skaara, that it didn't change operational parameters because Danny was a civilian and they were all supposed to go down to keep him alive anyway, telling himself...

Lies. And Danny had died to save all of them anyway, so what does it really matter, in the end?

It's another weight to carry and not let anyone see.

"I was married until I got back from Abydos," O'Neill answers steadily.

"Yeah," Daniel says. O'Neill wonders about the parts of Daniel's world that they're probably never going to talk about. "I think I really need a shower."

"Clean sweats in the drawer," O'Neill says, straightening up and turning away. "Feel free."

#

Daniel comes out into the living room a few minutes later, rumpled and damp in borrowed sweats and an Air Force t-shirt. Still no sign of Danielle and Carter; O'Neill wonders if they've run off to Denver together.

He walks past Daniel without speaking and goes into his bedroom. The Master Bath is the only full bathroom in the house, so that's where Daniel has been. The bathroom is cool and clammy from Daniel's shower, but despite the weather outside O'Neill turns up the temperature for his. Steam billows as he stands beneath the water, and fresh sweat breaks out on his skin, washed away by the spray. He stays in the shower until his heart is thudding with the heat and his knees are weak, then sluices himself off under cool spray and steps out.

When he walks out into the bedroom he hears music playing in the living room, something by Cherubini (composers he remembers.) That turntable system of his isn't antique, it's boutique; you can't match the sound quality of LPs with CDs, no matter what anyone says. And a lot of the recordings in his collection have never been reissued on those little plastic disks. He suspects Daniel's figured that out by now.

As he dresses, the smell of brewing coffee comes to him; beer is fine, but obviously coffee's better. It could be another Saturday a long time ago, but it isn't.

He goes into the empty living room, fiddles with the sound-system just a bit to improve the audio balance, and heads on into the kitchen. Daniel is standing there, eating cookies out of a bag and waiting for the coffee to finish perking.

"Sam called while you were in the shower," he says, seeing O'Neill. "They should be here in about fifteen minutes. They went to O'Malley's for lunch."

"Better deal than you got. You're going to spoil your supper," O'Neill adds, irresistibly.

Daniel snorts, a nearly-silent huff of breath, amused, and reaches for another cookie.

The coffee's ready, and Daniel pours, asking, with a lift of an eyebrow if O'Neill wants some too. He does. Daniel has something more to say, and O'Neill wonders what it is. They're building trust, but he doesn't think there will ever be enough trust among them for the two Doctors Jackson to give up the things the Pentagon wants from them.

"You," Daniel says, and then: "She's the one who loved you. Dani. Danielle. Well, not you. Hers. Very straight, by the way. A bad thing, in their case. So was mine." Daniel shrugs, leaving things unspoken.

"She was on SG-1 with him?" It's just to keep the conversation moving; O'Neill knows she was. Daniel takes the comment in the intended spirit.

"We always seem to be. She's the one who met all the other ... us. But yes. Five years. Then Kelowna happened, and the Furlings, and... she started running."

"And you?"

"You and I, we were always..."

Daniel stops. Whatever he'd been about to say, he thinks better of it, but O'Neill can finish the sentence and fill in the gaps by himself. 'Good friends'? He can't imagine not being a good friend to any version of Daniel, but he thinks that whatever he was like in Daniel's universe, Daniel was afraid to touch him, no matter how innocently; and that whatever he was like in Danielle's universe, they became afraid to touch each other.

He's sorry for them, though he knows why it had to be, in their worlds. No matter who loves, and how, the team has to come first. Could he really have lived with himself, knowing that he'd saved Danny's life when he could have saved Carter, or Teal'c—or saved Earth? Danny had known that, and hadn't let him make that choice.

"Kelowna happened for me and I, ah, came back later. Back from the dead, pretty much. My memories were pretty scattered at first, but I remembered a few things from having had, well, let's call it access to a lot of alien information. The memories faded pretty fast, but not fast enough. We were still looking for allies and weapons against the _Goa'uld_ , and I remembered where there was a cache of Ancient ... junk."

Daniel looks at him earnestly. This is important; something he hasn't told them before.

"Jack, I swear to you, all that was there was gold and jewels, a couple of history books that I could read because I could read Ancient by then, and one machine; an Ancient long-range communication device. No weapons. Nothing you can use, even if the cache is here too. We didn't know that at the time, of course, and since it was an Ancient machine, I thought it might take me to the Galaxy of the Gatebuilders, the Ancients, and this isn't ringing any bells with you, is it?"

"No, but don't let that stop you." He wonders if the Pentagon will believe him.

"So, I screwed up. What I found was the Ori, and I led them right back to our doorstep." Daniel's silent for a very long time. "On one of planets I was hiding on—after—a Prior came to my door and handed me Lya's head in a sack." Daniel stares down at the mug in his hands. His mouth is set.

O'Neill remembers Lya. She was a Nox. He really doesn't want to get into a fight with something that can take on the Nox.

"So if they could wipe out Earth, and the _Goa'uld_ , why didn't they just kill you?" O'Neill asks. Because he has to ask questions like these, if he's going to persuade Washington to leave Daniel's machine alone.

"I don't _know!"_ Daniel's voice is as close to a wail as Danny's ever got. The surface of the coffee in his cup sparkles as his hands shake, but he still won't look up. "Any more than Dani knows what the hell the Furlings ever _wanted_ from her. It just—she—we—destroy universes."

"They aren't here. They aren't coming here," O'Neill tells him. "And you never—look at me, Daniel—you never destroyed anything. That was their choice to make, not yours. You ran into a badder kind of _Goa'uld_ , that's all _._ And you did everything you could to stop them."

Daniel meets his gaze; O'Neill can tell it's an effort. "Earth's still gone."

"Look around," O'Neill says. "Earth's still here."

There's the sound of a horn in the driveway; Carter and Danielle are back.

#

This is the —twelfth? echo of Sammy she's met.

Most of them have preferred to be called 'Sam.' One was a 'Samuel.' One actually liked 'Samantha' better. That one was civilian. Hair to her shoulders.

Married to Jack.

Dani hadn't had time to be amused _(stunned, disbelieving)_ by the upside-down-ness of that universe, the one where she (he) had been an Air Force Major (Major-Doctor Daniel Jackson, USAF; she can't imagine the chain of events that could have led to that, and she never got the chance to ask.)Counting her Obligatory Waiting Period near the Mirror (not on 233 itself; 233 is radioactive; she always gated to a deserted planet nearby to wait) she only spent four days in that universe. She'd run into SG-1 by accident while she was hitting one of their emergency supply caches for food. Rodney McKay—a male version of Merry—was on the team (a lot of things were crazy there) not Sammy-Sam-Samantha. They'd taken her back to the Alpha Site, and called Dr. Carter-O'Neill to come out from Earth to help solve the mystery.

The Furlings came the next day, while she was still playing coy.

 _'Tell us what we wish to know, Danielle Jackson.'_  
  
She doesn't know what they want to know.

She'd gotten her hands on a zat and escaped from the Alpha Site that night. She doesn't know why the Furlings never stop her; they could, she's sure. But they never do.

She was there long enough, though, to see Sammy-Samantha and Jack together. It almost hurt, later, when she had time to think about it.

She wonders about Sam here.

Jack and Sam? They could want, even if they can't have. But Jack was looking at _her_ last night; she'd been unwary enough to be thinking of home and looking at him; thinking of Daniel at the same time, too; if there were a hell and you could go there for sex she'd certainly be going there now. And she doesn't think that Jack—typical male or no—would be in love with one woman and checking out another one, not openly, at least. According to the literature, men always look, and the difference between the nice ones and the bastards is that the nice ones don't let you know. Thus doth primate psychology make fools of them all; the lesson of the Land of Light: Man proposes but Broca divides.

So if Sara's out of the picture and it isn't Jack-and-Sam and she was born male here... who? It must be someone, mustn't it? There are certain constants across the universes; all the realities she's run into (through) are just variations on a theme. Nearly always a Stargate Program, an SG-1 with a familiar roster (even if she's usually male, and often dead when she isn't), and Jack.

In all the universes where she's _her_ , it's them. She knows that, now when it's too late to do her any good. Because it couldn't be them when he was alive, or she was. Rules and regulations and military propriety.

In the universes where she's Daniel-and-not-Danielle, it's Sammy, and that's worse, because Sammy's almost always military and even more forbidden than SG-1's civilian archaeologist ever was. But obviously it's always one or the other of them, because in the one universe where Sammy was neither on SG-1 nor in the military ... married.

Which makes her wonder why Jack was looking at _her_ last night.

Can't ask Jack O'Neill about his sex life just out of curiosity. Although she can certainly ask Samantha Carter about hers. And maybe she will. Have to talk about something that isn't classified, and she isn't completely up on current events yet.

#

They've gone shopping at the big mall near O'Connell Boulevard. The mall is just the same as she remembers. The stores are, too. Shopping spree courtesy of the SGC.

By mutual consent, they start with clothes for Daniel, since he isn't here. Sam keeps making suggestions, and after the first few, Dani wonders if the Sammy here is color-blind or just crazy. She knows this Daniel's tastes in civilian clothes as well as she knows her own and... no. Just... no.

"I know you're probably curious about me," Dani says, getting the ball rolling.

"I suppose you're curious about us, too," Sam answers. "We've covered all the professional things. But not a lot that's personal. Though I suppose the Colonel told you a little last night."

 _He told us where Danny used to sleep. That's about it._  
  
Jack has never talked much about Daniel's death. In some of the universes she's gone to, Daniel has been dead, though usually she's the dead one, and those are the hardest to leave. She shakes her head.

"It's hard to lose a team member." Dani rescues Daniel from potential ownership of the fuchsia silk Hawaiian print shirt that Sam has chosen and picks up a dark green cotton one with a small black print instead.

Sam smiles. "We all miss him so much. Everyone who ever knew him... those bastards."

"What?" Because the conversation seems to have taken a bizarre turn.

"Well, you know that he had to live with Colonel O'Neill," Sam says. She sounds both angry and apologetic.

"Yes," Dani says cautiously. She's met enough versions of Sammy to be wary of all the bizarre permutations of Mirror-reality. Some have looked very normal at first, until you find out that, say, the Third World War started in October of 1962 and the Stargate Program's main enemy isn't the _Goa'uld_ , it's Russia. "I was wondering about that."

"Colonel O'Neill was supposed to be _responsible_ for him. As if he couldn't be trusted. Just because he was—"

"Um?" Dani says intelligently.

"'Um,'" Sam agrees in disgust, and doesn't need to spell it out. "In the twenty-first century. They treated him like a child who'd babble top secrets to the first man he met, just because. Because."

"Blackmail?" Dani asks, because that's the only thing she can think of.

"How can you blackmail somebody who's never been in the closet?" Sam asks scornfully. "I don't think Danny ever dated a girl in his life; he didn't make any secret of it. No, they were afraid of how it would _look."_  
  
The offer of the Hawaiian shirt makes so much more sense now, Dani supposes, assuming being gay means you want to dress like a flamingo. And apparently the Pentagon figured that homosexuality was curable, so they sent Danny Jackson to live with an ex-Black Ops, ex-Special Forces United States Air Force Colonel so that —what? The testosterone would rub off?

"And they figured him living with Jack would be _better?"_ Dani asks in disbelief.

Sam laughs. "Oh, my god, you know, that's almost what he said. You're a lot like him, you know, Dr. Jackson."

"Where I came from, I _was_ him," Dani says. She hesitates. "They called me 'Dani,' too. But I can see if you wouldn't want to—"

"No," Sam says. "I can do that. Providing you can manage to call me 'Sam.' Every time you call me 'Sammy', I look around for my mom."

 _Mom?_  
  
"Um, then your dad, he—?"

"He died of a heart attack when I was just a kid," Sam says quietly. "I guess that's why both Mark and I decided to go into the Air Force, really. Anyway, let's finish up here and get started on you. And you can tell me more about Daniel."

#

It's late afternoon. She and Sam have come back to Jack's house with their purchases; a suit for Daniel, a dress for her (in case they need to do something formal); a few changes of casual clothes, so they can dress as civilians at need.

She's weighted down with shopping bags, and not all of them contain clothing, shoes, and accessories. Some of them are filled with little luxuries that Sam insisted the SGC would be happy to buy them. Belgian chocolates, fancy cookies, gourmet coffee to take with them when they go back to the SGC tonight or tomorrow. She hopes it's tomorrow. She hopes for one more night to be able to lie naked in Daniel's arms. To make love to him. To have choices.

They didn't really choose to come back here—to one more version of Earth—but Jack didn't give them a choice: he bought them, and then there was nowhere else to go but through the Stargate. Maybe they should have tried harder, back there on 747, to discourage him, but what he offered was too seductive. The chance to be _people_ again.

When she and Sam come into the house, Jack and Daniel walk out of the kitchen. They both look damp and freshly-showered, and Daniel is wearing a pair of threadbare grey sweat-pants and an Air Force t-shirt. He's barefoot. His skin is faintly pink from the sun.

"Buy out the Mall, Carter?" Jack asks.

He's so much like her own Jack, and she's always trusted that man. His Mirror-copies vary; they're all recognizably Jack, but if (for some reason) she (or Daniel) don't appear in the timeline, the Jack she meets can be frighteningly dark. If they've simply died at some point after Abydos, it's not as bad. Daniel (Danny) has died here, but this Jack doesn't worry her.

"Just a few things, sir," Sam replies innocently.

"Let me help you with that," Daniel says, coming into the hallway to relieve Sam of several shopping bags.

"Suitcases?" Jack asks. As in: _I hope you bought one of those too._  
  
"Come on," Dani says to Daniel. "I'll show you what I got you."

#

She leads him back into the guest room and closes the door; she wants to change into her new clothes. She's eager to wear the civilian clothes of Earth; it will be the first time in, literally, years.

How many? She doesn't know. She's not sure how long she spent running though universes; it might have been a year, it could have been more. The time before that—the year after Kelowna, the year Daniel was 'dead' in the universe next door—she spent less and less time at home as her universe unraveled, more at the Mountain trying to fix what couldn't be fixed.

A year, here, with Daniel, trying to fit into alien cultures so far away from anything they knew that the people weren't even afraid of the _Goa'uld_. The galaxy is a big place, and for all the _Goa'uld_ 's posturing, they'd only conquered about a quarter of it during the thirty thousand years or so that the _Goa'uld_ Empire has been a going concern. It amuses her sometimes—still—that she can toss out figures like that so casually. A quarter of the galaxy. Thirty thousand years. Still, they're facts, and facts have always been what she loved best.

She knows too many facts now.

She tosses her bags on the bed; Daniel sets his on the floor. The bed has been remade with different sheets, all the damming evidence of last night gone. She sits down on the bed to unlace her boots. Combat boots, and she'll be happy to trade them in for the sandals she bought at the mall. It will be nice to look like a civilian again, instead of like a slave or a soldier.

"Danny was gay," she says idly, dropping one boot on the floor and bending over to start in on the other one. She waves a hand, semaphoring the rest of the sentence. _Exclusively gay._ Sam made that very clear.

"Ah... yeah." Daniel sounds as if he already knew.

She looks up—around the bedroom—and back at Daniel.

"I don't think he spent a lot of time here," Daniel says quietly.

Danny didn't sleep in his own bedroom.

She's seen the house. There are only two bedrooms. There's a nice big bed in the other one. Big enough for two.

She'd wondered how the relationships in this universe ran. Now she knows. Not Sam. Not her—because she doesn't exist. But a version of her, because that's the way the variations run. The _male_ version of her. That's who Jack was in love with here. She's horrified. She knows it shows. Not because that means that, oh, god, there's a Jack somewhere— _here —_ who's _gay_ —bisexual—and was _doing it with gay male Dr. Jackson—_  
  
—but because two members of SG-1 were having an affair. _SG-1's Commander_ was having an affair with another member of SG-1. Having what she could never have. What _they'd_ never had. She takes a deep breath, the half-unlaced boot forgotten.

Daniel raises her to her feet and puts his arms around her, cradling away the shock. He holds her as she's held him, as they held each other in Ixis' captivity. Since they met, they've been each other's only refuge. Sanity and home.

"I'm guessing about the details," he says. She feels the sound of his voice in his chest, his breath against her ear, as he speaks. His voice is low to the point of inaudibility; by now, it is habit, and only the dentives, plosives, fricatives, and sibilants stand out with any real clarity; rocks and sunlight in the quiet stream of speech. "What he told me was that Danny lived here as a security measure. Pentagon homophobia."

Alan Turing solved Enigma, founded modern computer science, and was still hounded to suicide for loving men. It's not implausible. But it's not the whole truth, is it?

Daniel kisses the side of her neck. Daniel loves both women and men. If it had been Danny—and not Danielle—who fled through the Mirror to meet Daniel, they would have become lovers just as easily as she and Daniel have.

She's seen the photos of Sara and Charlie. She saw the way Jack looked back at her last night. Jack-here is like Daniel.

It's not his sexuality that's the shock. He might have been bisexual in some of the other universes she passed through, or even gay. How would she know? The first Alternate Sam she met said that every possible variation of Reality existed through the Quantum Mirror, and sexual preference, like gender, is just another point of variation. Straight, gay, bisexual, male, female, dead, military; she's catalogued every imaginable variation of herself by now.

No, it's not Jack's sexuality that's the shock, it's the affair. It's something she thought that Jack would never do. Cross that line.

"Why?" she asks.

"I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Danny slept in here every night. But Jack loved him... as much as Jack loved you."

 _As much as I loved Jack._  
  
He won't say it, now or ever. She won't ask him to. Daniel's Jack was kind, and smart, and brave, and everything a friend and leader should be.

And straight. He'd loved Sam.

Apparently it's necessary to the balance of the universe for Jack to fall in love with at least one of them, always. Maybe—somewhere—it's Teal'c.

"Teal'c," she says aloud, knowing she won't need to lay out her whole train of thought for her Quantum Double. And Daniel laughs just a little, and kisses her on the mouth, and hugs her very hard for just a moment.

"Come on," he says, letting go. "Let's get changed. I think Sam and Jack have dinner plans for us. And yeah, maybe we'll pick up Teal'c."

"And Nyan," she says. "Do a Team Night." She sits back down on the bed and reaches for her boot again. The team matters most.

Here, too?

#

On Monday afternoon Colonel Simmonds is in General Hammond's office.

O'Neill dislikes Simmonds for a number of reasons. The combination of expensive civilian suits and military title. The fact that he's NID, and O'Neill has more than a little reason to suspect him of being as dirty as they come. Harry warned him about Simmonds before he died, and no one would have better reason to know what Colonel Francis Simmonds was capable of than the man who recruited him. Harry had neither morals nor scruples, but at least he'd known which side he was playing for. O'Neill isn't quite sure Simmonds can make the same claim.

"Colonel O'Neill," General Hammond says, when he arrives. "Colonel Simmonds is here from Washington. He says he'd like to talk to the Doctors Jackson."

"Oh, I'd like to do a great deal more than that, General Hammond. I think you'll agree that this is an NID matter."

"No..." O'Neill drawls on a rising note. "I'd say this is an SGC matter, Colonel. Dr. Jackson was a member of my team."

"'Was' being the operative word here, Colonel O'Neill. And these ... _people ..._ belong in NID custody."

"And why would that be?" he asks, because the reason he's here—other than to say 'no way in hell'—is to ask these questions. He's General Hammond's stalking horse. It's the way the game is played.

"We're in the best position to exploit them," Simmonds says.

"Well, we don't really feel they need to be exploited," O'Neill says lightly.

"I've been explaining to Colonel Simmonds that we feel that it's in everyone's best interests if both Dr. Jacksons remain in SGC custody for the time being," General Hammond says.

"Why?" Simmonds snaps. Apparently General Hammond was doing a good job of stonewalling him before O'Neill got here.

"Oh, we're hoping they can clear up a few unsolved mysteries," O'Neill says. "Tell us where Danny hid the good coffee. Things like that." It hurts a little, using Danny like that. But he's dead. He's safe from Simmonds and people like him, and O'Neill knows, as surely as if he's still alive and here, that this is something he'd want to do. Use himself to protect them.

For a minute he expects Simmonds to puff up like a bad movie villain and say something like _'you won't get away with this,'_ but Simmonds is too good a game-player for that. He knows he's lost this round. He smiles instead.

"I'd hate to have come all this way without at least getting a chance to see them and ask them a few questions. I understand that one of them is a woman. That should be interesting."

#

They walk into the Briefing Room—there are two SFs behind them—see Simmonds, and stop, for just a moment, before coming the rest of the way in and sitting down. Apparently Simmonds is a familiar face.

"Colonel Simmonds has a few questions for you, Doctors," General Hammond says.

"It will be much better for you both if you cooperate," Simmonds says.

It's completely the wrong thing to say. Daniel suddenly looks like a wide-eyed idiot. Danielle looks earnest and a bit annoyed. "I love cooperating," she says fulsomely.

Simmonds smiles at her and she smiles back in a way O'Neill doesn't trust. "I bet you broke all the boys' hearts back home," he tells her. "Were you married?"

She stares at him, the smile fading as her face goes blank. "What about you, Dr. Jackson?" Simmonds asks, looking at Daniel.

"Ah... which of us were you hoping to have sex with?" Daniel says, after a very long pause. "Because I have to tell you, you're _really_ not my type."

"Just trying to establish some background details," Simmonds says blandly. "The file sent to Washington was fairly light on your personal backgrounds."

"You could just pull out the one on your Daniel Jackson and read it again," Danielle suggests. She's made a good recovery, and the irritation is back. "UCLA, Harvard, Columbia, The Orientalist Institute; it's probably all there." She looks as if she's going to continue; Daniel stops her with an undecipherable glance. She shrugs.

"I'm interested in your differences, not your similarities," Simmonds says.

Danielle appears to think about this for a moment. "Daniel likes sausage and pepperoni on his pizza. And I'm a woman."

"I used to have tropical fish," Daniel says vaguely. He blinks, and seems to focus on Simmonds for the first time. "You're going to have to be more specific," he adds reprovingly.

O'Neill clears his throat. Entertaining as this is, it's gone on long enough.

"It's difficult to say, Colonel," Danielle says, and her voice is businesslike now. "We were both on SG-1 in our own universes, just as, ah, Danny Jackson was here. Because of that, General Hammond felt that the best procedure would be a detailed mission-by-mission debriefing and comparison, so that Daniel and I could determine where our universes diverge from each other, and to determine where they differ from your own. In that way, we can maximize the beneficial potential of any possible intel that we represent, while minimizing the possibility of error through non-congruence due to quantum drift."

Daniel is staring at the ceiling now. He startles and looks down. Apparently he's just been kicked.

"Yes. Ah... we've found that things aren’t always, well, exactly _identical_ between universes, and given the differences we've already uncovered, I'm sure you'll agree that it's necessary to be very careful. I'm sure the NID is always very careful." Daniel smiles engagingly. Simmonds is unmoved.

"This is all very entertaining, and I don't believe a word of it. According to your initial reports, you made contact with alien races of great power which gave you access to superior alien technology. We want that technology."

Danielle looks at General Hammond; O'Neill can't see her face. Daniel glances back at the ceiling again for a moment. "You want to worship the Ori?" he asks, looking at Simmonds.

"Let's not mince words," Simmonds says.

"Fine," Danielle answers. "We have no idea of how to contact either the Ori or the Furlings. They have no interest in sharing technology with you any more than the _Goa'uld_ do. I don't think the Ori even _have_ technology, really. Not exactly. Aside from that, yes, we _do_ have a lot of information that you can use. And we _are_ cooperating. But it's going to take a long time to deliver it, and we don't want to make any mistakes that will get anyone hurt."

This much, O'Neill thinks, is the simple truth.

"And _I_ don't think you're going to be in a position to dictate the terms of your cooperation for very much longer, my dear. So enjoy it while you can. General Hammond, as always, it's been a—qualified—pleasure. Don't bother to show me out. I know my way by now."

"They didn't give us anything," Danielle says softly, after he's gone.

"I never did like the NID," Daniel says. "Thank you, sir," he says to General Hammond. "For keeping us here."

"I'm certain that Colonel Simmonds will complain about our lack of cooperation," General Hammond says. "But for the time being, the two of you are needed here to assist the SGC. We'll leave it at that." He gets to his feet and walks back to his office.

"So which of us do you suppose he _did_ want to have sex with?" Daniel asks the ceiling.

"Simmonds never had sex in his life," Danielle answers.

She glances at him, then looks back down at the tabletop. O'Neill sighs. "Lotta mission files to get through," he says.

"Could take years," Daniel says.

They all know they won't be given years, though General Hammond will hold off the NID as long as he can. Based on what the two of them have given them so far, he might even be able to come up with a good reason _not_ to go after the things they don't want them to go after. Protecting them—personally—from sticky fingers is going to be harder.

"Let's get back to work then," Danielle says.

#

The first time he kisses Danielle, it's like coming home.

There's more of Danny's stuff up in the bonus room over the garage. Books, mostly. The bonus room had been Danny's study.

Cleaning it out once and for all is kind of a pretext to get the two of them out of the Mountain again the next time SG-1 has 48 hours off the line. They both want out into the open air and sunshine, but it's been ten days now since they got here and the Pentagon is still hanging fire about what to do about them. One Alternate Universe Danny it could handle, O'Neill guesses, but two, and the meetings go on forever.

O'Neill has turned in his report on the cache of Ascended-or-Ancient goodies ('Ancients' see: 'Heliopolis' see: 'Gatebuilders' see: 'Ascended'), and on why they should let sleeping dogs lie. They only ran into the Ascended a few months ago—a guy named Orlin, who was sweet on Carter—and O'Neill's in no hurry to turn the entire Galaxy into something that looks like Velona because of a family fight between neon octopuses. It may be the deciding argument there, but they still need Dani to talk more about the Furlings. Hammond is giving the two of them a pretty long leash. He's even got them doing a little work, translation and cataloguing. Confined to Base, though, except under supervision. That's nothing new. Teal'c lives his life that way, and nobody cares how many times he's saved Earth.

Danny lived his life that way. In the eyes of Washington, O'Neill was his jailer, accountable for his every move. Where he went, who he saw, spoke to, _touched._ It was the private joke that kept them sane. It's kind of entertaining that nobody in Washington seems to think anything of the transfer of wardenship, as if all Dr. Jacksons, however multiplied, are interchangeable. There's a guy in a car parked across the street, though—with the NID sniffing around General Hammond had no choice there—just in case the two of them try to jump O'Neill and make a break for it. There won't be any repeats of that first morning's adventure.

He wonders, now, knowing what he knows, if it would have been better for everyone if they'd just run then. He suspects they could have gotten away. But it's too late now.

So Dr. Jackson is in the room over his garage, cataloguing books and artifacts for final disposition, and Dr. Jackson is sitting in his living room nursing a beer. Daniel chased her downstairs after half an hour.

"Thanks for busting us out of there," she says.

She never looks at him directly. Even in that first briefing, when he'd look at her she'd look away. It took O'Neill a while to be sure of it, but he's been watching her carefully over the last week or so. He's gotten used to seeing her now; being with each of them is painful in different ways. He imagines a Danny and a Jack—a Dani and a Jack—who could walk down the street holding hands without anyone noticing.

Though because of who they'd been, it would still have been wrong.

"What are friends for?" he says. Not all that accurately, but he doubts she'll call him on it. He and Daniel would have been friends, on the other side of the Mirror. He wonders what he and Dani were to each other.

"What do they want to do with us?" she asks, getting to her feet. She's in jeans and a t-shirt today. Carter helped her pick out the clothes. They're pretty.

She's pretty.

Danny was too pretty for his own safety and for anyone's peace of mind. He'd walked into the fights that brought him chin up and defiant. Time and hardship had changed him, beginning the transformation from pretty boy into handsome man; Daniel has finished it. He knows Danielle's the same age—same everything—that Daniel is, that Danny was, but looking at her, it's almost possible to imagine she's simply gone the other way, toward adolescence instead of adulthood, except for the fact that there's really nothing masculine—or childlike—about her at all.

"Washington's still spinning its wheels," he says. General Hammond's trying to get them asylum, but it's slow going. They're still managing to hold the NID at bay, keeping them from being transferred out of the SGC into 'protective custody' somewhere else.

"Don't let them lock us up somewhere," she says. It's as close as either of them has ever really gotten to asking for anything, except that first day, when she asked them to let them go.

He knows it's what they're most afraid of, and sighs heavily. "You know they want what they think you have." The Ancient cache may be off the table—he's not sure yet—but there's still the Quantum Mirror. Even Carter wants that.

She gets up and walks over to the empty fireplace and stares out the window beside it. When she talks, she speaks to the glass.

"From Kelowna, the Furlings sent me to an Alternate Universe. I came home with knowledge of the future: that was the gift of the Furlings. Nothing that would do you any good, though; we're too far apart from what you've said. I used it to change our future, and because of what I did, my universe was destroyed. I escaped through the Mirror just before the end. That's one."

It takes him a moment to realize that she's finally telling him what she's been running from.

"I went back to the Alternate SGC I'd been sent to before; I thought it would be safe, or I could warn them, or _something,_ but the Furlings had been to the other Dr. Jackson's universe while I was gone. The SGC was deserted. I stayed there for three days, reading his last journal and trying to contact anyone on Earth, but I never heard any radio signals, and the Gate never locked, no matter what address I dialed. He wrote that the Furlings had offered them another kind of gift: _naquadaah_ and _naquadriaah_ technology, shields, hyperdrive technology... Of course war broke out over them once the news of their existence leaked. Daniel-there thought the _Goa'uld_ came, too. He wasn't sure. The last entry in his journal said the stars were going out. That's two."

He gets to his feet. Quietly. If she's in a mood to confess—and this sounds like a confession—he doesn't want to interrupt her. But her insistence on knowing their history before telling them anything finally makes sense. They aren't all from the same point in time at all. She's from the future. _A_ future, anyway.

He wonders what she's told Daniel.

"I used the controller to take me to a Mirror that was off-planet, then I contacted the SGC again. It took me six tries—six _universes_ —to find one that responded. Four days later, the Furlings showed up in their Gate Room with the same offer they'd made to Daniel's universe. Furling gifts. The problem, you see, is that if you don't pay for what you get from the Furlings, there's always some kind of disaster. And they never let anyone pay."

It sounds bizarre, but SG-1 has run into stranger alien cultures. "They must have believed you when you told them not to take them," O'Neill suggests. Maybe not entirely. Maybe not immediately—especially if she was in a universe that had a 'Daniel' instead of a 'Danielle'—but he doesn't think they'd disregard her warning completely.

"Jack did. General Hammond did. Daniel—I was male again—did. The Pentagon didn't." There's a long silence as she finishes her beer. "Daniel dialed the Gate for me a week later—after they lost Washington—and I ran."

She sets the empty bottle on the mantelpiece. "I tried again a few times, trying to change the future. Sometimes it worked, and I kept the Furlings from..." she stops. "That was worse. Oh, god, Jack, that was worse." There's another long pause, as she stares at nothing, her back to him. "I stopped. All I wanted to do was stop. I stopped contacting the SGC. But they... kept... coming."

He walks up behind her and puts a hand on her shoulder, because the desolation in her voice is something that belongs in his past, not hers.

 _'the stars were going out'_  
  
And she turns around, looking up at him. She isn't Danny, and for her, he isn't Jack.

 _'She's the one who loved you.'_ He hears Daniel's voice in his mind. He knows it's half a lie. He can't imagine not loving Daniel, in any version, or Daniel not loving him.

It's been a long time since he's touched a woman with any sort of intent—if you leave out Argos and Edora. On Argos he'd been drugged. On Edora he'd been convinced he'd be spending the rest of his life there. Aside from those two occasions, he's been faithful. But Danny's been dead a year. He'd never been anything other than territorial, but he'd also been one of the kindest men O'Neill had ever known. _Possession_ — so he'd said once— _stops at the grave._  
  
_But not memory,_ O'Neill tells him. It doesn't matter.

He puts his other hand on her hip and feels her tremble, just a little. He knows he isn't touching her in any way anyone who looks like him ever has. He doesn't hurry anything. He lets her decide.

She steps forward into the kiss. It's a relief and—he doesn't want to think it but he can't shut out the thought—a disappointment to find that it isn't like kissing Danny at all. Her skin is flushed, and silky in the way only a woman's can be, and he presses her against him as their mouths lock, feeling the clench of the muscles in her back. She's up on her toes, trying to even the difference in their heights, her arms around his back, holding on as if someone might take him away from her. She's much more than willing. So is he. It's where this has always been going.

It's what he wants.

It's not forbidden.

He tastes beer and flesh, smells skin scrubbed fanatically clean. Her glasses dig into his cheekbone. This isn't, he promises himself, a sick attempt to resurrect Danny. If it were, he'd be upstairs kissing Daniel, wouldn't he? In fact, this would be a really good time for both of them to think about Daniel, but he can't. He realizes with a violent combination of relief and arousal that he's exactly where he wants to be. A certain comforting familiarity; no possibility of confusion. He runs his hand down her back, finds skin, runs it back up again under her shirt. It's been a long time since he unhooked a bra one-handed while a woman was trying to climb inside his mouth, but he still remembers how.

She breaks the kiss at the touch of skin-on-skin and regards him breathlessly, trying to focus; she's almost panting, and even though her hips are still rocking against him and he can tell she really can't quite track, there's suspicion and disbelief in her gaze.

"Why?"

"Thought I was supposed to be the oblivious one." Because he's actually wanted her from the beginning, and he knows she's wanted him. Not someone else with his face; it's been him she's been looking at.

He leans in, and she doesn't pull away, but they aren't kissing this time. Their bodies are pressed together and he can feel her breath on his mouth, short shallow puffs.

"The things you do for your country? Make Dr. Jackson roll over and give up those Gate addresses? Is this what you try next? I'm not going to tell you," she says. "Daniel won't either."

She's holding onto him too tightly for him to pull away, even if he intended to. She's just called him a whore, and he can tell she's praying it isn't true.

"I don't give a damn what you know," he tells her.

She tilts her chin up, and she closes her teeth on his lower lip, and she bites.

"Come on," O'Neill says a minute later. "Bedroom's this way."

#

He leads her up the stairs to his bedroom, a little stunned with confession and kisses, and she isn't completely sure what either of them _wants._ She wants him—she does, she thinks she does—and he wants her, she knows it—but is it all _real?_ This Jack has already loved and lost his own Dr. Jackson, a different iteration of her. Male. It doesn't _precisely_ matter, but it's proof, every time she remembers it, that this world isn't hers. Hers-original, because it might be hers now by default.

He takes off her glasses this time before he kisses her. An intermediate step; affirmation that yes, they're still on the same page they were on in the living room. She's allowed to touch him. All of him. Lips and tongue; his taste, his possibility; he's not so much taller than Daniel but it seems like more. He has one arm around her, holding her in place for the kiss, but he unhooked her bra in the living room and he hasn't forgotten that now. His other hand slides up her ribs, rough and warm, slipping easily under her t-shirt, and his fingertips push the scrap of fabric upward. Blue and lacy. Sammy— _Sam_ —picked it out. His hand is on her breast, and his thumb rasps over her nipple.

The sharp spike of pleasure makes her gasp; sucking at his mouth, clutching at his hips to keep from staggering. She's a combination of wildly aroused and bridally terrified, because it's _Jack_ , and she's starting to believe he's real. No. She's believed he's real for a while now, and that's why anything that will happen will hurt.

"Bed?" she says. She'd like it to sound assured. It comes out as if she's forgotten how to breathe.

"Bed," Jack agrees. He kisses the side of her neck, beneath her jaw, and lets her go.

She kicks off her sandals and unsnaps her jeans. Once upon a time her body was a roadmap of her experience; all the scars of her past, from childhood misadventures to alien torture. Gone now, just as the (real, other) world is gone. Automatically she turns her back, peeling off the t-shirt (blue; Sam had wanted to buy her pink; she never wears pink; Sammy knew that) and the brassiere. She holds them in her hand for a moment, not sure of what to do with them, then drops them on the floor. It doesn't matter.

Jack comes up behind her, arms around her, hands sliding up to cup her breasts. She leans back against him. He's still dressed. T-shirt under flannel shirt; it's open because of the weather, and the sleeves are rolled up, but—

His thumbs move over her nipples, and she forgets what she was thinking. He's watching himself touch her—her nipples are hard—and he slides his fingers up the underside of her breasts so that the nipples are caught between thumb and forefinger, pressing and rolling, not quite as hard as she wants right now, but hard enough to be good for her. She breathes out heavily, feeling the tweak and pulse of arousal between her legs. _This isn't getting us into bed,_ she wants to say. _You're still dressed. Move it._ She sighs and leans back into him instead, wanting this—this moment—to go on forever. Instead, he kisses the side of her neck, moving his hands down to her hips, pushing her jeans down. She shoves them the rest of the way off and steps out of them, turning around.

"Had all your shots?" Jack asks.

She's in the middle of reaching for him; she stops.

"I've got the implant. And I'm clean," she adds, in case he's worried about that, though she knows he's read Janet's—read Dr. Frasier's—reports and knows her medical status better than she does.

He nods, but he's moved over to the nightstand. Sets her glasses on top, opens the drawer, reaches in. Pulls a couple of condoms out of the drawer and tosses them onto the bed. She makes a muffled sound of exasperation and he smiles at her. "Yeah, I know. You're clean and you're safe. Let's just be careful."

She's not sure she knows him well enough to be angry. _Do you think I'd lie to you?_ She's been lying to him since she got here, if only by omission. She skins out of her underwear—plain and sensible, but the color matches the bra—and turns to the bed, pulling back the covers, making sure the damned condoms end up on one of the pillows. She doesn't bother to talk. They both know what they're here for.

He undresses quickly, even though he takes the time to fold the pieces, piling them on the dresser. Then he's in the bed. And she knows all the moves in this dance, so she stretches out next to him. She doesn't want him to, for god's sake, call this off—game called on account of Dani's crazy—but she wishes she knew _what to do._ She thought she did, five minutes ago.

She knows this body so well. _Not this body._ And not like this. Naked. Wanting her. His skin all the colors from 'the-sunblock-isn't-really-working-Carter' to the light bronze of having been able to get out in the yard a lot this summer to the white of those parts that never see the sun at all. He's cut. She already knew that, actually—from that unfortunate incident on Argos, just to begin with.

"You're thinking. Stop it," Jack says.

She moves into his arms, feeling his cock press into her belly, hearing his breath hitch—on the way back to where they were in the living room; mindless physical _getting off_ —and that's good, supposed to be good, and he kisses her, and that _is_ good, because it helps her stop thinking, just a little.

His skin smells sweet. Ever-so-faintly of salt. He showered this morning, and will undoubtedly shower again when he leaves this bed. Everyone is so clean here; no one has any scent at all. Even his scalp is clean; there's no scent of oil, and only the faintest odor of soap. He's never used any aftershave that she could smell; that's still true.

He's touching her all over, skin to naked skin, and she's touching him too, shoulders and back, and the hollow at the base of the spine and down over the swell of buttock-muscle. All the familiar scars are there under her fingertips like the beads in a rosary, absolute proof of god knows what. _Jack._ She hooks a leg over his hip, begging the universe to let her get _through_ this before something she can't articulate happens.

He rolls them—her on the bottom, him on top—and she thinks, _now,_ but he's moving down her body and his mouth is on her breast.

And the pleasure is real—it's good, it's _him—_ but she can't, still can't, stop thinking. About Jack. About Danny. They were lovers, she knows it, and if Jack thinks he might not be safe with her, needing-condoms-not-safe, it would be because of something that came afterward, in the months of his bereavement; Danny died at almost the same moment she and Daniel came through the Mirror; a few more days, and she and Daniel would have gone on, because Daniel wouldn't have been able to survive here, and she would never—

"I said _stop thinking,"_ Jack says, raising his head. He tweaks her nipple hard enough to make her gasp—derailing her train of thought momentarily—then he lowers his mouth again, sucking and licking. She grinds her hips into the mattress. She doesn't want foreplay. She wants absolute possession, and she doesn't know how to get it.

He strokes a hand down over her belly, shoves her legs gently apart, presses his fist against the lips of her sex, rocking his hand against her until the lips part and his knuckles are wet and slick. He slides his knuckles into her, over her, up over her clit, and it's _so good_ , but she doesn't trust it, because it has no history. This isn't their bed. It's a venereal bed for another her, and this isn't what Jack would have done there.

She feels his cock pressed against her thigh. His leg is draped over hers. Easily. Possessively. He's in her arms, and she wants him so much she can't breathe, but a part of her is thinking _get it over with,_ because the faster it happens, the less room there will be to disappoint him, and of all things, she can bear that least of all. She's squirming against his hand—restless, aroused, aching—when he slides his fingers into her and raises his head to brush his mouth over hers.

"You aren't going to make this easy, are you?" Low voice. Almost a whisper.

She lifts her head from the pillow and kisses him so she doesn't have to answer. He isn't being fair. She _is_ making this easy. She's wet and she's ready and she wants him and he's hard. She just can't get her mind to _shut up,_ and she suspects that Jack knows that, and she's afraid to imagine him being in this situation before _—with Danny, oh, god, what was Danny like?—_ and what he thought, and what he did.

It was Jack-and-Daniel here. Only Daniel was Danny. Someone different. But Danny was more like Daniel than she is, and so—if she _has_ to think, she thinks of that. Jack kisses her, and in her mind, he kisses Daniel. Her breath huffs out in surprise at the sheer _eroticism_ of the image, and she slides her hands down Jack's back. Muscles and scars. Daniel would see them, would touch them.

Daniel could always help her.

Jack moves his fingers in her, a circling, rocking motion. The ache of arousal is dull and sharp at once. She can't keep still. Can't think of anything else now but wanting him inside her. She opens her eyes and Jack is watching her. He's been watching her all along, and she knows she can't hide a single thought from him. There's a brief bright razored moment of panic at being so exposed, so vulnerable, then she lets it go, realizing how much she trusts him. It's Jack. Her lips form his name, soundlessly. He's watching her, wanting her, and the thought of wanting him— _this_ man—is almost enough to drive her over the edge.

_Dan-Dani-Danny-Daniel-Danielle-Dan'yel-Dana're—_

All of her, across the quantum web of universes, leading to this bed.

"Please," she says.

He makes a satisfied noise and kisses the corner of her mouth, the side of her neck. Withdraws his hand and wipes it on the bedsheet. She spreads her legs wider as he kneels between them.

He takes a moment to take the condom and roll it into place, but it only serves to fuel her bizarre enabling fantasy—she doesn't need it now, but it's too seductive to abandon completely—and when he slides into her, her mind fractures into a blurred sensory reconstruction of Danny-Daniel, erotic archaeology, and _that_ has weight, has presence, has history, binding her here, to this world, to him, and she keens—breathless, arching—at the weight and feel of him—in her, opening her, stretching her.

He moves, and her body catches up to her mind, racing ahead, dragging her down into flesh, beyond words, until she no longer cares who she is, only who _he_ is. His breathing is rougher, faster; half-voiced sounds of pleasure and approval, and his skin is humid now beneath her hands. He speaks to her with his skin, because bodies don't lie, and he's telling her that he wants her with everything he is. Wants _them._  
  
There is no fantasy now. There's only reality. His body inside her—wet, sticky, suck and thrust and clasp, slide and clench and grind. Her hands on his skin. Her legs are spread wide, feet planted, knees bent. Her head is thrown back and she pants shallowly. She needs to _get there_ —as if climax were some physical location you could reach—and the sounds he's making—good, good for _him_ —urge her on. Feeling his hands on her neck, her back. _Going to work,_ she thinks in delight, as the sweet hot painful tension coils in her groin, her clit, her cunt, and then she's there, or it's here, and _oh god this is why they call it coming—_

#

"Go where?" Jack asks, nuzzling the side of her neck. He's moving gently against her, setting off aftershocks, and she quivers each time he presses home. He's still hard. He hasn't come yet.

She's puzzled, but then she plays back the last few seconds in her head. _I have to go,_ she'd gasped out when she came. Common sexual response: nonsense phrases at climax. People call out for God or their mother. Not something she normally does, though normally when she's gotten off this hard, she doesn't want more, either. And right now she does. She's rocking back at him in time to his movements, and he's starting to speed up, just a little.

"Nowhere," she answers. She hears the slurring in her voice. She feels boneless, disjointed, stunned, wanton. "Here." _Love you. You._

He looks down at her and smiles. "Good." A more deliberate thrust into her and she gasps. It turns into a groan before she can stop it. "Might be awkward."

She pulls him against her as hard as she can.

#

When she comes for the second time Jack is so close to the edge that he doesn't stop. She goes over—orgasm, precipice, abyss, annihilation—digging her fingers into the muscles of his ass and doing her best to lift them both up off the bed, greedy and oblivious with climax. The next thing she's really aware of after that is of him lying, a post-orgasmic sweaty dead weight, on top of her. She lifts his weight with every breath, and he's gasping as if he's just run the marathon; she can feel his heart thudding against her chest. She's quivering in every muscle, and her heels burn as her legs slide flat against the sheets, clasping his thighs, their passage lubricated by sweat. She can smell him now; the salt-scent of sweat and the sharp tang of perspiration. Familiar and real and absolute and known. She sticks her tongue out and licks his shoulder.

"Hey," Jack says, drowsily.

After only a few seconds he lifts himself away, reaching carefully down between them to hold the condom in place, and pulls out of her. He sits up to peel it off and leans over to dump it into the trash, then pulls the sheet up from the foot of the bed to cover them before he lies back down. They're both sweaty, and it will help.

She feels hammered by pleasure, wanting nothing more than to sleep. To be held as she sleeps. _Men don't,_ she reminds herself carefully, but he's already gathering her in.

She tucks herself into him until she's lying against his chest, exhausted by the ride on her personal emotional roller-coaster and wanting only oblivion for an hour or three. He's holding her, he wanted her, she's had him, they've had each other. This is what it's like. But, unbidden, the thought comes: _is this what it would have been like?_

No way to ever know.

#

Something brings him awake sharply. Not Danielle; she's still asleep, a moist boneless weight plastered against his side. Her breathing is deep and even.

He looks toward the bedroom mirror. The bedroom door is open; it reflects the hallway. The hall is darker than the late-summer-afternoon bedroom, but he can still see the figure standing there. Daniel. He's got a clear view of the bed, and what's in it.

Their eyes meet in the mirror, and Daniel walks away.

#

"We need to talk," he tells Daniel.

"We actually don't," Daniel says.

It's hours later. Daniel's done upstairs for the day, and is in the kitchen making dinner. It's the only way, he says, that he can be assured of something safe—meaning edible—to eat. Dani, O'Neill has already discovered, can't cook. She seems proud of the fact.

By the time Daniel made his next appearance, O'Neill and Danielle were in the living room, playing chess as if nothing had ever happened. And nobody said a word.

But O'Neill can't let this lie. He won't do that to Daniel. So when Daniel went off to the kitchen to start dinner, O'Neill told Dani to stay in the living room, and followed. Daniel deserves the chance to call him a bastard in privacy.

"Look, about this afternoon," O'Neill says determinedly. Daniel holds up a hand. It's the hand that's holding a very large, very sharp knife; Daniel's cutting up raw chicken to make stir-fry. O'Neill can think of very few people he'd have this conversation with when they were holding ten inches of carbon steel and the nearest gun was in the living room. Daniel is one.

"I saw you, you know I did. Look, Jack, why do you think she came downstairs in the first place? I'm assuming she didn't have to take you by force?"

O'Neill shakes his head fractionally, thinking of all the unspoken conversations he's seen between the two of them. Did they discuss his seduction in advance?

"And I hope you got around to the Furlings, because that's actually why I sent her down there," Daniel says, setting down the knife.

"Actually, we did the Furlings first."

"That must have been damned exhausting," Daniel says, taking the double meaning right into the gutter, and suddenly the poker face of a moment before is gone, and Daniel is grinning wickedly at him.

And O'Neill realizes he's being teased. For thinking this is something that matters, for having the archaic notion that he's stolen Daniel's woman. If it does matter, it's not in the way he's imagining. It's not Daniel's consent that's required; it's his. And if he's not quite sure what he's agreed to, that's nothing new with any version of Danny. He's sure he'll get the memo eventually.

So he hugs Daniel, at least partly in relief that nothing will change between—among?—them, and for just a moment Daniel stiffens—not in rejection, but in surprise—and hugs him back very hard.

And Dani walks into the kitchen—just as good at following orders as Danny ever was—in search of a beer.

"Oh, for God's sake," she says, sounding long-suffering and unsurprised. "I'm going to starve to death."

"Get over here and help, then," Daniel says, snagging the waistband of her jeans and pulling her away from the refrigerator. "I know you're good with a knife."

#

They spend the evening out on the deck talking, surrounded by enough citronella candles to send Teal'c into a permanent state of _kel'no'reem._ The two of them are circling the one subject that obsesses them painfully, but it isn't who sleeps with whom, or who might.

It's what's going to happen to them.

The Stargate's on Level 28. They haven't been closer to it than Level 23—Secured Medical—since they got here. They don't have authorization to stay on Earth; and even if they get it, they both know—if they're unlucky—they'll end up in an NID safe-house somewhere, separately or together.

They both know O'Neill has no certainty to offer them. And if he helped them escape through the Stargate it would cost him his career. Possibly his life. And he knows they won't ask him to do that.

"This Mirror doohickey's that important?" he asks. _To leave alone,_ he means.

"I think so," Dani answers, after a long pause. It's dark, and the candles are for scent, not light. He can't see their faces, only hear their voices. "The SGC almost always finds the Quantum Mirror. Everywhere I know of that they did, the Furlings came—except the places that got the Ori instead. At the very least, once you have it, you risk opening a doorway to a universe where the Furlings... are."

"Or bringing a Prior through it," Daniel says tonelessly. "The Ascended exist here. It's possible."

"All right," O'Neill says. He's made up his mind about how this is going to go down, but he won't worry them with his decision. He has no idea if they're right—no one can—but he knows they're sure. He knows they've told him as much of the truth as they know, or understand, or are ever going to. The rest is details.

"Carter's gonna have to learn to live with disappointment," he says.

Daniel sighs, and tilts his head back, staring up at the sky. Dani leans forward, making a wordless noise, staring out at the darkened lawn. The light from the candles catches in the lenses of her glasses and runs along the frames.

And because of what he's made up his mind to do, that night—and every other night they spend at his house—Dani will sleep in the guest room with Daniel.

#

"Sealed the deal," Daniel says against her neck. His tone is faintly amused.

"Huh," she says. "Don't think so. You know Jack."

It's good to lie here in bed with Daniel. Something they don't do at the SGC. They're still under audio-video surveillance there. It wouldn't keep them from sleeping together—chastely—but neither of them wants to give that much away. Jack won't betray them, not in this. Jack has secrets of his own.

Daniel's arms circle her from behind. Tomorrow they go back. And who knows when—or if—they'll see the light of day again?

"Made up his own mind," Daniel says, agreeing. "What did you tell him?"

"The Cliff's Notes version. He'll probably have more questions."

"Which you'll answer."

"Most of them. I don't know why it was me, I don't know what they wanted to know—"

"Hush." He kisses the side of her neck.

"I died three times on Kelowna and it didn't stop them."

"I know."

She closes her eyes tightly, stops the words in her throat. She's told Daniel these things before. Kelowna. Jonas. The _naquadriaah_ device. Trying to beat the future in every variation.

Watching Jack, Sam, and Teal'c—echoes of them, in one of the variations—die of radiation poisoning. She should have died too. She'd been just as exposed as they were in the run for the Stargate. Janet couldn't explain it. She'd had no symptoms at all.

Teal'c had died last. His symbiote had made him more resistant. He'd still died. When they were all dead, the Furlings came again. She'd gone with the escort to take Teal'c's body back to Chulak for cremation, and kept going. She hadn't stayed to see the endgame.

The variations she ran to kept dropping her near the Kelowna mission, or else it isn't as fixed in time as the other markers, because she's gone on it more times than she wants to remember. Once she'd shot Jonas and simply waited for the device to explode. That didn't work either. Until she found Daniel, there'd been no way out of the game.

She puts her hand over his, circles his wrist with her fingers.

"Hush," Daniel says again, speaking to her thoughts, not her words.

#

He and Hammond fight it all the way to the White House and the President before the decision comes down: hands off the alien toys; the risk outweighs the potential benefits to Earth. Thank god Landry used to be a military man.

It's a month, now, and still no decision on the two Jacksons. They aren't quite prisoners, but they certainly aren't free. The SGC won't be sent after the Quantum Mirror and the intergalactic communicator, but unless they're granted asylum with full rights and privileges, no one can stop anyone with enough clout from taking Jackson One and Jackson Two away to question them about them. And Administrations change.

He knows General Hammond is asking them to be patient—patience being defined (as everybody knows and nobody's going to say) in terms of him not having to lock them up to keep them from making a break for the Stargate. Hammond will protect them as far as he can—assuming there's something they need protecting from. And if Hammond can. He won't help them escape.

It's one of the hardest things O'Neill's ever done during that two weeks of waiting, to walk through the Stargate with SG-1 on their missions, knowing that when he comes back the two of them might have vanished into some black operation somewhere. Harry's dead; if they disappear he'll never find them again without that kind of expert help.

Cold comfort to know that they'd both miss him as much if he didn't come back as he'd miss them if they vanished.

#

It's been a month.

A month since Jack bought them and brought them to Earth.

She can't really think of it as 'home.' That would be too dangerously seductive. The glimpses they've had of almost-freedom make it worse. They make her want a future she doesn't see a way to reach, because the power to get there lies with others.

She and Daniel have no power at all.

They're treated well. Fed and clothed and given the illusion of choice. They have an office they can go to, work they can do. Guest ID that will allow them to move at will around half a dozen levels of the SGC—accompanied, always, by a tactful team of SFs.

They're prisoners.

General Hammond asks for their patience and cooperation. Jack has promised Daniel that Washington will not order the SGC to pressure him for the address of the Ancient cache. Just as well, as it isn't a Gate address, it's a location: the cache is right here on Earth, buried so deep beneath the Isle of Avalon that they'll never find it unless Daniel tells them where to look. They aren't asking them about the Mirror any more either, and that's good.

But they aren't letting them go.

She knows General Hammond is trying to get the Pentagon to grant them asylum. If he can, they'll be as safe as any other U.S. citizens from anything the NID or its sister agencies would like to do to them, but unless that happens, the NID could still walk in here and take them away.

She knows—Daniel knows—what the NID wants. The cache. The Mirror. Some way—probably—to contact the Furlings and even the Ori. By now they've given up everything else, all the harmless things, cross-checked their worlds with this one as proof of their good intentions. All they've held back is a handful of Gate addresses and mission details that could lead to disaster. And her knowledge of a future that she hopes will never be. Things she does not think they could conceal from men like Simmonds. For a while, yes. Not forever.

The only way they can be certain of keeping their secrets is to run again, take another trip through the Mirror, another chance. And to do that, they have to get to the Stargate. Ten levels below them. Impossible.

#

The office is barren in comparison to the one they both remember. Even though one wall is filled with reference books, there are no personal mementos. Souvenirs of missions, joke-gifts from Jack, photos of friends from her (Daniel's) past—none of those things are here. Despite that, it is a haven. Lending dignity, providing the illusion of personhood.

"The longer this goes on, the harder it gets," Daniel says.

She looks up. The translation she's working on isn't particularly difficult, but it's complicated and long.

Daniel doesn't need to elaborate. _Harder for them to stay. And harder for them to go._  
  
"It could be easy for you," Daniel says. His voice is neutral. He gets to his feet, stretching. "There's Jack."

"Daniel," she says warningly. She pushes the chair back.

"You should listen."

"I shouldn't."

She knows what he's thinking. Who knows him better than the woman who led his life in the universe next door? She didn't bring the Ori into their galaxy, but she could have. Something she did brought her to the Furlings' attention, after all, even though she has no idea what it could have been. And that was disaster enough.

"It will be easy. You can talk him into it. Or—don't talk. He'd do it for you."

"You cannot mean this." She steps away from her desk. If she stays near it, she'll break something. She moves toward him, as if confronting him physically can stop this disastrous flow of words.

"Marriage confers citizenship."

"And you? What about you?"

"I'll just—"

 _"No!"_  
  
"For once in your life, listen!"

"To you talking about sacrificing yourself? Leaving?"

She knows exactly what he's thinking, though it's nothing they've ever articulated. That the sticking point for everyone here—if not at the SGC, then in Washington—isn't the fact that they're Quantum Doubles of Danny Jackson, but that there are two of them. If there'd only been one of them found on 747, no matter which of them it was, this matter would have been resolved weeks ago.

"One of us—"

And now Daniel intends to sacrifice himself somehow. Throw her into Jack's arms, certain that Jack will take care of her. He's right in that, she knows it, and in this moment she hates them both for it—and because it's something that Jack can do for her, but not for Daniel. And Daniel will go, go where she cannot protect him. Go where he cannot protect her.

"Together!"

They'd promised each other that.

"Well that isn't going to work here, is it? Stay with him—you love him—and I'll figure out some way to—"

 _"Leave me!"_  
  
"That would be best, yes. Because I'm thinking—"

"No, Daniel, you aren't! You're going to go off and try to get yourself killed, and—"

"This is no time to play Jack O'Neill with me, because I'm really—"

#

He walks down to their office and into a fight.

Dani has just hit Daniel. That's obvious. Two people who think talking solves every problem have gone back to sign language. They're standing face-to-face—her back is to the door—and the sound of the slap blurs into the opening of the office door.

He doesn't bother to ask if he's interrupted something.

Daniel sees him, though his head is turned to one side and his eyes are watering a bit. There's a red blotch on his cheek. His body-language cues her to turn; she sees him and freezes; O'Neill can tell from the way she's flushed and gasping that it was either a screaming fight or they were just having wild sex, and since they're standing under a set of security cameras at the moment...

Not, actually, a good place for either one.

"Going," she says briefly, and her voice is high and hard. _I'm going now._ She pushes her way past him and out the door. Doesn't even stop to say 'hello,' though SG-1 has been offworld since yesterday morning and there've been post-mission protocols and a meeting with Hammond for most of the afternoon. God knows where she thinks she's going, but it has to be somewhere on-Base. Probably toward the nearest coffee.

When O'Neill looks back at Daniel, he's sighing, shaking off the blow and the fight. He doesn't raise his hand to his cheek; that would call too much attention to what just happened. But he settles his glasses back in place and moves over toward the bookshelves in their makeshift office as if everything aches.

"Bad day?" O'Neill asks.

"I've had worse."

Daniel won't settle. He moves around the office, picking things up and setting them down as if he's looking for some way out that the door can't offer.

"I don't suppose..." O'Neill begins.

"That I want to talk about it?" Daniel asks savagely. "You never used to be big on talking, Jack."

O'Neill sees the moment when the sense of Daniel's own words hits him, the understanding that he's ... slipped. Not through a mirror, this time. Just in his mind. Into the... mistake... that O'Neill is the Jack that Daniel thinks of, inside himself, as 'real.'

"I could listen," O'Neill says. He's always been better at that, anyway.

Daniel waves this aside, agitated. His hands move as if they can warn away not only words, but his own thoughts. They slow only barely as he speaks.

"I should go. There has to be somewhere I can go." His face is turned toward O'Neill but his eyes are blind. "To another— You two can— Help me, Jack. Please. I'm so tired of breaking things."

"Dammit, Daniel!" O'Neill snaps, because this isn't Danny, Danielle is Dani, Danny-with-an-'i', and this is Daniel, and somehow, though it will never be all right that Danny is dead—

 _just as it will never be all right that Charlie is dead_  
  
—with Daniel and Danielle here, it's better.

And as if the sound of his name is another blow, Daniel arches backward, his head going back against the wall with a small soft sound.

"Oh, god, Jack." His eyes close, and he laughs despairingly, a sound that catches halfway to a sob. "I want my _life_ back."

The life where someone named Jack called him Daniel. Where he stood in an office like this one and Jack said 'Dammit, Daniel,' in just that tone.

O'Neill knows about ghosts. They never go away. So you have to pretend they don't exist.

"You can have some of it," he says, making his voice quiet and pleasant and normal, because that's what he came down here to talk to them about in the first place. "Your job here. Authorization finally came through from the Pentagon. You've been granted asylum. Citizenship. The whole enchilada."

Daniel opens his eyes, slouching the other way now. All his weight on his shoulders and looking, more than anything, confused. His hair's too short to fall into his eyes, but Dani's would.

Danny's would.

"Both of us?"

"Hate to break up a set."

Daniel sighs again, and straightens up, away from the wall, and drops his chin on his chest, rubbing the back of his neck as if it aches. Considering how hard he got hit, it probably does.

He glances up—through his lashes, over his glasses—at O'Neill, mouth quirked in a shy apologetic smile. _Sorry to be such a bother._  
  
Half the time Danny was apologizing—sometimes he even meant it—and the other half he was telling O'Neill to go to hell at the top of his lungs. He'd never backed down from a fight, not even the last one.

It hurt for so long to think about Danny at all that O'Neill refused to. Killed Danny's memory more thoroughly than death could manage. In a way O'Neill can't quite understand, Daniel and Danielle have brought him back with their presence, because Danny was gone until they came.

He hasn't slept with Dani again since that first time—and of course, he's kept his hands off Daniel entirely. They've been focused, all three of them, on the larger prize: keeping Doomsday out of the hands of petty kingmakers. And while there was the slightest chance O'Neill might have to go rogue to get them through the Gate again—not for love alone, but because what was in their heads _could not be allowed_ to fall into the hands of stupid politicians—he had to keep his head and his distance, watching them cling to each other in the knowledge that they were still, despite the best efforts of these echoes of their loved ones, _objects_.

That's over now.

"Now tell me why she hit you," O'Neill says. The handprint is fading, but there's going to be a beaut of a bruise.

Daniel has the grace to look embarrassed. He bites his lip, and O'Neill knows that whatever comes out of his mouth next is going to be an evasion.

"You wanted to dump her and run off somewhere," O'Neill guesses. One look at Daniel's face tells him that if that isn't quite the absolute truth, it's the version Dani believes. Did Daniel think that one Dr. Jackson would be more acceptable to The Powers That Be than two? Or that once he was gone, O'Neill and Dani could settle down and play house?

"I—"

"For God's sake, Daniel, you told me you'd been married." He knows Daniel's hurt and frustrated and Dani—wherever she is right now—is livid—but at the moment this whole situation strikes him as so irresistibly funny that he barely manages not to laugh.

Daniel makes a helpless gesture. "You love her," he says, as if that explains everything.

O'Neill raises his eyebrows meaningfully. _Don't you?_  
  
"It's not that simple," Daniel says.

"Yes," O'Neill says firmly, "it is. I might not be the brightest guy around, but I know better than to just chuck something good and run off because I get cold feet."

"You think—" Daniel says in indignant disbelief. _You think I'm scared._  
  
That's not what O'Neill thinks. He can't imagine a Danny-Daniel-Danielle that would let it matter, anyway, and that's what bravery is.

"I think if you go anywhere she'll go after you," O'Neill says. "If only to, you know, _shoot_ you for leaving."

And thank god Daniel finally looks as if he sees the truth in that. And maybe he realizes that the time for running and sacrifice is over. O'Neill reaches out and pats him on the shoulder. Bluff masculine good-fellowship. Nothing the security cameras can't witness.

"So I guess we, I, or, ah, _you_ should let her know that, ah, we can stay now. And then, um, I should let her...." Daniel stops. There's no really good way out of that sentence.

O'Neill smirks at him. "You do that, Daniel."

#

The paperwork is over quickly, and the SGC is in possession of not one, but two Doctors Jackson. The following week, at their urging, they spend most of one morning in the Control Room. They're the only ones there. The blast-doors are lowered, and the security cameras are off line. SG-1 is guarding the door. Hammond's given the arrangements—and the plan—his blessing.

They're locking addresses out of the Dialing Computer. Carter spent the previous day showing them how to do it. When they're done, Carter does a full purge and restart of the system, then uploads the edited system files to the Pentagon backups as part of their standard weekly maintenance. Those addresses—whatever they were—are gone forever.

#

The first time he kisses Daniel, Daniel is more surprised than anything else.

The two of them—Dani and Daniel—have just bought a house. Together of course. Anything else would be damned unlikely, even though O'Neill and Dani have taken up again where they left off. It's more with a sense of relief than with any grand passion—as if it was something left too long undone—but there's something else undone and they both sense it.

All things in their proper time.

The house has four bedrooms, and two of them are set up for sleeping, though O'Neill is pretty sure that one of the two isn't going to get much use. It's about half a mile from his place. He helped them pick it out. Nice quiet neighborhood.

They've been free citizens of Earth for the last thirty days. Long enough to close on a house if you hurry the paperwork. It helps to have friends in high places.

He's given them most of Danny's remaining things. It makes his house seem a little empty now, but it will make theirs seem more like home to them, and he can't begrudge them that. Carter and Teal'c and Nyan all pitched in to help them furnish it—Teal'c especially; he's been watching a lot of HGTV lately, and has strong opinions. O'Neill thinks the cobra floor-lamps are a bit much, but Dani seems to like them. The mask collection fits right in. There's an official housewarming, of course. Any excuse for a party.

It's the middle of October, but still warm enough to barbecue if you stretch a point, and O'Neill's official housewarming present to them was a bright shiny new grill. There's beer, and cake, and all the trimmings; General Hammond stops by to pay his respects, and the house is filled with people and laughter and talk. And then, later, it's down to just the team, and a little while after that—after dinner, after dark—Carter gathers up Teal'c and Nyan to drive them back to the Mountain.

"She's going to let him drive, you know," Dani says when they're out the door.

"I did not hear that," O'Neill answers. Teal'c loves to drive. Unfortunately, he doesn't have a license. O'Neill leans back on the couch, cradling a beer between his hands. Good thing he walked over. Nice to be able to.

Daniel is sitting next to him, looking a little baffled. It's one of the ways in which he's least like Danny; Danny loved parties, but they seem to confuse Daniel a bit. Or then again, he may be drunk. He's not as much of a lightweight as Danny was, but when it comes to drinking, Dani definitely has the harder head of the two. Right now she's wandering around the living room, searching out the few last stray empties. She looks at Daniel, then at him. O'Neill looks up and meets her eyes, and she smiles.

Daniel is still expecting her to choose between them. O'Neill doesn't know why; Daniel has never impressed him as a stupid man. It's obvious to O'Neill that Dani never intends—has never intended for one moment—to give Daniel up. Nor does O'Neill have any sense of being engaged in a short-term relationship. The future is a difficult subject—his job, her past—but neither of them is interested in the temporary.

She wanders on into the kitchen, twitching her hip at him meaningfully. _Time to do the thing undone._  
  
He turns toward Daniel. Daniel looks up.

He's not sure what Daniel sees, looking at him, but whatever it is, it makes his face go blank with surprise. His mouth drops open in a very un-Danny-like expression of no-longer-thinking-at-all, but O'Neill knows this isn't Danny. This is Daniel. Someone different. Someone new.

He leans forward, slowly, because if Daniel doesn't want this, Daniel needs to be able to say 'no' with as much grace as possible under the circumstances.

But Daniel doesn't say no, and their lips meet.

For an instant it almost seems as if Daniel doesn't know what to do, then he's kissing back. Intense, but uncertain. And thinking—O'Neill can almost hear it—about choosing. O'Neill reaches up to cup his face, running his thumb over the line on Daniel's cheek where the beard stops. Not that there's any beard at the moment, but it's a faint line between smooth and slightly rougher skin. He likes the feel of it.

Daniel pulls back. "Dani—" he says.

"Both of you," O'Neill says firmly. He doesn't let himself think about how damned perverse it sounds. This is what he wants. This is what _she_ wants. That just leaves Daniel.

Daniel nods, slightly—confirming a theory. "All of us," he says, and when he leans forward again, Dani is forgotten.

O'Neill hasn't forgotten what it's like to kiss a man—something that's not likely to slip his mind, no matter how long he's been widowed. Solidity and strength and equal mass and muscle. And the fact that mean time to ignition is just as fast. He's got both arms full of Daniel, and Daniel's trembling. Lips and tongue and _oh don't stop;_ they've gone from First Date to Hardcore in under a minute and that's just fine with him. O'Neill's just as glad he got the bug-sweep out of the way before dinner. He's done the house twice today, because it would be good to know if any of their guest-list couldn't be trusted, but the place was clean. Both times.

Daniel reaches out, and checks himself halfway, and O'Neill takes his wrist and guides Daniel's hand where it was heading. It settles over his crotch— _yes, Daniel, I'm hard —_ and Daniel's hand firms into place, cupping and rubbing, as his mouth opens further. O'Neill feels warm pleasure spike through him at the sureness of the contact, feels everything go tight and hard and _ready_. He'd like it to go on, and there are things—a lot of things—he wants to do to Daniel in return. But not here. It's not all that late, but he thinks it's time for bed.

"Let's go," he says, getting his mouth off Daniel's with an effort. "It's a new couch." And somebody would fall off, and the coffee table is slate and weighs a metric ton besides, and sooner or later Dani's going to come out of the kitchen.

#

She stands in the middle of the new kitchen, setting empty bottles on the counter. Home at last, and a great relief after living in one of those extended-stay hotel suites for so long. They could have stayed at the SGC, but they'd wanted to be above ground. And moving in with Jack—both of them, for that long—might have attracted attention.

There are already bags of bottles stacked in corners. A trip to the recycling station is in their future.

Hers and someone's.

They've actually been here for almost a week; not long enough to get settled in completely, but enough to make a good start on it, especially when nearly everything has to be bought from scratch. Less to unpack that way. She opens the dishwasher and starts to unload it. It's something to do while she's waiting.

In another few minutes maybe Daniel will come in, seeking consolation—not his Jack; can't take his place—or Jack will—he swung, he missed—and she'll comfort whichever one comes, knowing she'll need to seek out the other one later. (She'll also—if things don't work out—have to manage to be the first one upstairs tonight; a different problem. One she hopes not to have.)

Maybe it's unreasonable of her to want to tidy things up this way. She hasn't actually talked to Jack about it. She and Jack talk about as much as they ever have; the one constant across a thousand universes. It's certainly a subject she hasn't raised with Daniel. A Jack O'Neill who could want him, and who's sleeping with her instead? Daniel loves her (she admits that to herself now, finally, just as she admits to loving him), but that's one conversation they'd better not have. And Daniel is still, even now, waiting for her to make up her mind between them: choose one, and give up the other.

The third option is better, if they'll take it.

Because she doesn't want to give up either one of them. She can't give up Daniel, and she won't give up Jack. Therefore—it's logical, if not reasonable—it's only fair for them to have each other as well. If that's what they want.

She's not entirely sure.

Still as much of a risk for Jack as it ever was. Or maybe less of one now, since Daniel's passing as straight, and Jack always did. Though Daniel's not Danny. Well, neither is she, and Jack wants _her._ She wishes she could have known him, their so-different Mirror cousin. She thinks he's someone she'd have liked.

She knows that Jack is _aware_ of Daniel. And that Jack knows that she'd object—more than object—to sharing him with another woman, with anyone else, but Daniel...

Daniel will simply be closing the circle.

And Daniel, well, this isn't the man he fell in love with, but he's close, and does that make things better or worse? She knows what Daniel wants. It's what they both always wanted, and now, by quantum alchemy, they can both have it. The question is, what will Daniel let himself have? Daniel wants what's right, what's fair. In her opinion, Daniel spends too much time thinking about other people. He's said that about her, too, of course, but she knows better. She's selfish enough to grab happiness now when it's offered, and damn the consequences. Daniel should do the same.

Eventually she realizes she's managed to dawdle for fifteen minutes and nobody has come in. She goes quietly back to the living room, and the couch is empty.

She goes to the hall closet—time has taught her to make no assumptions—and checks carefully. Jack's leather jacket is still there. The door is chained and locked from the inside. They're both still in the house.

She goes back to the kitchen, fixes herself a nightcap. Returns to the couch, finds the remote, curls up under the Navajo blanket—General Hammond's gift—and turns on the television. She'll go upstairs in a few hours.

Both her men under the same roof, and all is quiet. A good start to the future she hopes for.

#

He follows Daniel up the stairs, wondering, just a little, which bedroom Daniel's going to pick. Daniel heads automatically into the one the two of them sleep in, though. Home court advantage? He's been up here before, but just for the tour. The walls are painted a dark moss-green—good for keeping it dark in the morning—and the bed's big enough to play football on. It still looks a little stark, though. Give them time.

Daniel flicks on the lights and stops abruptly just inside the doorway.

O'Neill walks in, sees what he's seen, and puts an arm around his waist, walking him in far enough to close the door behind them. He checks automatically: curtains are closed, and they're good and thick. Nobody standing outside can see shadows, no matter how much light there is in here.

"Beats the hell out of mints on the pillow," he says. He walks over to the bed. There's a large blue tube of Astroglide on top of a couple of hand towels centered in the middle of the bedspread. He picks up the pile and looks under it ostentatiously.

"What?" Daniel says, coming over to him.

"Looking for the 'how-to' manual. Guess she forgot it."

Daniel makes a disbelieving sound of amusement. "I don't think we'll need it."

"Guess not."

He tosses the items back to the bed, and Daniel moves back into his arms, and this is good, because now he can get his hands on Daniel's ass, but naked would be a whole lot better, and from the way Daniel's rubbing himself against him, he thinks he can get a consensus going here. He kisses him until he's pretty sure Daniel's forgotten where they are—he _likes_ kissing; it's the best foreplay there is—then smacks Daniel's ass gently. "Let's go. Bed."

Daniel blinks and steps back, a little unsteady and visibly hard. Glasses go on the night-table, then he sits down on the chair to strip. He's a top-down guy; O'Neill prefers to work from the bottom up. The gun in the waistband holster is the first thing off, though. It goes into the drawer; he turns on the bedside light, too. He isn't really surprised to see a gun there already. He sits down on the edge of the bed, toes off his deck shoes and pulls out his cell phone. Considers the night-table, then tucks the phone into one of his shoes instead. Easier to find in the dark if it starts ringing. He strips off quickly, down to his shorts, folding everything neatly, then gets up to fold the covers back to the foot of the bed. The towels go under one of the pillows. The lube stays within reach.

When he turns around, Daniel's standing, down to briefs. He's a draper, not a folder. O'Neill picks up his clothes and goes over to turn off the overhead light, coming back to set his clothes on the chair. Daniel's already on the bed, fiddling with the lamp to dim it down, then shucking out of his underwear. He tosses them toward the chair and misses. O'Neill picks them up and adds them to the pile before moving toward the bed. There's just enough light to see by. Daniel glows like ivory.

O'Neill sits down on the edge of the bed long enough to remove his shorts and pitches them at the chair—basket—before moving up onto the bed next to Daniel. Not lying down yet, though Daniel is. On his back, one knee drawn up, and back to running some kind of complicated pass/fail scenario in his head, but all his. Something O'Neill hasn't let himself think about for the last three months, ever since he saw Daniel Jackson back on P-Whatever-Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot, because first Daniel reminded him too much of Danny, and then he didn't remind him of Danny at all. He puts his hand on Daniel's chest.

"Is this all right?" Daniel asks, and so O'Neill knows that Daniel's thinking about Danny. The last man in O'Neill's bed. So to speak.

He could tell Daniel that _Daniel_ moved on (Sha're)—not equivalent, and not really the word; it makes it sound (even in his head) as if he's given Danny up, and he hasn't—or that _after_ Daniel's decided to get naked is a really stupid time for this discussion. He doesn't. "It's all right," he says.

Daniel nods, just a little; O'Neill's pretty sure there's a longer conversation taking place inside his head, but there really isn't any need for it. The important things have been said. He smiles down at him, running his hands over Daniel's skin—good to know a few things in advance, like the fact that Daniel's impossibly ticklish—moving down. Daniel's skin is sarcophagus-flawless. No visible history, and Daniel won't tell. Not about the parts that leave scars, anyway.

Daniel reaches up, wanting to touch. Not Danny, but definitely in the same food group. O'Neill isn't sure whether this is foreplay or archaeology; Daniel's just running his hands over him, everywhere he can reach except, for reasons that probably make sense to Daniel, his cock. Not even looking, now; his eyes are closed. His touch is firm and deliberate, and O'Neill may be in doubt about Daniel's purpose here, but his cock isn't; he'd managed to go down a little between the couch and here, making sure everything else was in order, but the way Daniel's mapping him out has everything back on-line again, and he's not quite sure whether he wants Daniel's hand on him there right now or wants to anticipate it a while longer. He thinks of all the things he's missed, and all the things he's thought about when he was alone at night these past few weeks, and slides his hand around Daniel's cock. Daniel's hips angle upward off the bed at the touch—one sharp jerk—then he settles again.

Hot. Not soft—he's hard enough to throb against O'Neill's hand—but Daniel isn't cut, so there's a sheath of loose skin to play with. He rolls it back, stretching it tight along the shaft. The head is shiny and wet, and he leans down and takes it into his mouth, and when he does, Daniel makes a sharp desperate sound as if O'Neill has bitten him instead, thrashing so hard that O'Neill pulls back. Daniel's primed to break the indoor land speed record. Not much fun for anybody. So he lies down beside him, letting Daniel feel that he's hard, staying well away from Daniel's cock, running his hand over Daniel's shoulder and down his arm until he hears Daniel's breathing slow.

His to touch.

He thinks Daniel might talk now—it's all out in the open, after all, the two of them naked here in bed. But Daniel just shifts toward him, pressing his face into O'Neill's shoulder, and the movement makes O'Neill's cock slip over Daniel's hipbone, settling into the hollow just inside. Daniel's arm goes around his back, and the hand trapped between them—no good way to sort everything out, not unless they're going for Zero-G sex—comes up to brush against O'Neill's chest. Still touching. But silent.

"I want—" he finally says against O'Neill's throat, and O'Neill knows that tone. _Unknown, impossible,_ it says.

He imagines loving Danny, and never ever, _ever_ able to touch him. To have Danny know, and ... was there pity? Or just the kind of love that hurts worse than hate? He knows there was love. Daniel wouldn't be here if there wasn't.

"Tell me what you want." Because he's sure of a lot of things about Daniel, but not this. Danny was cheerfully explicit about what he wanted in bed, but Daniel is an unknown country.

Daniel rolls all the way toward him. They're pressed belly-to-belly now, and Daniel's cock is pressed up next to his—meet'n'greet—and Daniel hooks a leg over the back of O'Neill's thigh, groaning and gasping at the contact. He pushes hard, using all his strength, rocking his hips and panting, and O'Neill pushes back, feeling Daniel's cock and Daniel's skin, and he groans, and Daniel makes a faint surprised-sounding noise and pushes harder. And it's good, yeah, this'll get them there all right, but O'Neill doesn't think this is all of what Daniel wants.

"Come on. Talk to me," he says to the top of Daniel's head. But Daniel just burrows in harder. Can't say, or won't.

His arm is under Daniel's; he disentangles it enough to get his hand free to stroke Daniel's hair. Daniel raises his head, and O'Neill kisses him again, since Daniel isn't talking. He's digging his fingers into O'Neill's hip hard enough to leave bruises, though, and for once it doesn't make a damned bit of difference how many telltale marks O'Neill picks up from this little tango, or where they are, because he's got a bombproof cover story in place to explain each and every one.

From the sound of Daniel's breathing, this isn't going to take long, and he figures if this was where this was going to go, and this fast, he might as well have kept his mouth where it was in the first place, and decides what the hell. He gets a knee under him and manages to roll the two of them until Daniel's on the bottom and neither of them's been crippled, and Daniel's staring up at him, flushed and wide-eyed; halfway to getting off, and more than halfway to really believing he's here. That they're both here. And right now O'Neill wants both to finish this _immediately_ —grab the lube, grab Daniel's cock—and to fuck Daniel into the mattress, but he's had a master class in the gentle art of self-control. He'd like this to be good. To make up to Daniel for all the ways in which the world didn't go quite right in all the ways he'll never talk about.

"This is nice," O'Neill says calmly. "But I really want to suck you off, if that works for you."

The body beneath him arches, as if even the words are too much. Daniel closes his eyes, licks his lips, then opens his eyes again. "I want you in me," Daniel says, and his eyes are wide. Questioning. _Is that the sort of thing you do? Will you do that for me?_

O'Neill smiles, letting Daniel feel all his weight. "Instead?"

Daniel groans shakily and finally smiles. "If you keep asking questions like that it's going to be a ... moot point. No."

O'Neill lifts himself off Daniel's body—his cock objects sharply, but he tells it that it's going to get plenty of attention soon—and moves down the bed again. Daniel slides up against the headboard, moving into a half-sitting position, knees drawn up, clutching his balls. Trying to keep himself from going off right now. O'Neill's pretty sure he isn't going to have much luck with that. Just as well he's been through the flip-side of this first time already. Twice, actually, if he counts Danny, but he doesn't. Danny was different. Not his one true love, or even his first love. Just his love.

He settles into position on his side, a leg over one of Daniel's, moving deliberately, not drawing things out or hurrying. Slides one hand between Daniel's cock and his belly, getting his arm under Daniel's forearms—he doesn't want Daniel going anywhere when there are teeth involved—and grips Daniel's cock with the other, pushing the foreskin back again, until his fist almost brushes Daniel's clenched hands, and then O'Neill sucks him in. When he inhales, he's got a nose full of Daniel's scent. Sex smell. Rut and salt and yeast.

Daniel makes a whining sound at the back of his throat—it's on its way to being something only dogs can hear—and goes completely rigid. His hips come up off the bed again—O'Neill was right; he's going to thrash—and he shifts to really get his whole forearm braced across Daniel's hips. He puts his other hand on Daniel's thigh, and he bears down hard. It takes him a moment—as always—to negotiate with his gag reflex, but then he's got cock all the way down his throat, and Daniel stops clutching his balls—a good thing, too, or there might have been serious damage soon. He pulls back enough to swipe his tongue around the shaft a little before sinking back down again, and now he can feel Daniel's hands—on his head, on his shoulders—but he's not pushing, thank Christ, just touching in quick jerky movements. It gives him a good idea of how close to gone Daniel is, as if the fact that Daniel weren’t trying to fuck his tonsils right now wasn't a real clue. He sucks hard, feeling the skin on Daniel's cock slide up, and Daniel gives a faint heartbroken-sounding wail and comes.

Ninety seconds, tops, start to finish. He's able to pull back enough so it all hits the back of his throat and fills his mouth, instead of going so far down he coughs. Thick and bland; only in bad porn is it hot and salty. Or maybe with weird aliens. Not out of the question.

He needs to pull off to swallow, and takes the chance to glance up at Daniel. He's holding onto the headboard, head back, mouth open. O'Neill goes back for the afterglow, and he's right; Daniel likes this _(too)_ ; soon his hands are back, stroking in rhythm with the movement of O'Neill's tongue over his softening cock. The muscles beneath his hands are relaxed now, and he strokes gently, small movements of thumb and fingers. He doesn't quite trust Daniel's reactions enough to let go.

"Oh," Daniel finally says. "Oh."

He's verbal again, a good indication that it's time to move. O'Neill lifts his head, letting Daniel's now-soft cock slip from his mouth, and sits up, working a few kinks out, because as much as he likes sucking a guy off, there's no denying that it's hard on the neck.

Daniel's eyeing his package with a speculative expression. O'Neill's cock twitches, reminding him of what's supposed to be next on the menu. If not that, then something else. It's what Daniel asked for, though. He puts one hand on Daniel's thigh, stroking, and grips himself with the other. _Down, boy._  
  
"Next item. I hate to ask, but ... you've done this before?"

Daniel smiles at him, contented and affectionate and relaxed. "Yeah. You want all the details?"

"Just want to know neither of us is in for any surprises here."

"This is already kind of a surprise," Daniel answers softly.

O'Neill smiles. They'll talk about that, but not now, because right now he's a lot more interested in getting off than in a three-hour tour of alternative relationship patterns through history. He moves up beside Daniel, and Daniel reaches for him, wanting a kiss. He's more than happy to oblige, but much more of this and he's going to need either an icepack or a raincheck.

"Pick a position."

"Oh my side."

Daniel slides down the mattress and turns onto his side, his back to O'Neill, drawing his top leg up to his chest. O'Neill reaches across him for the lube and unscrews the cap. He squeezes a splotch into his hands, thinking they should come up with something more efficient in the way of delivery systems for this stuff, and slicks himself up first, because it's going to be cold, and he'd like this to last a while. It has the desired effect, taking him back from the edge a little, and what's left on his hands warms up enough so that it probably won't send Daniel into orbit. He scrapes it together onto the tips of his fingers—a good dollop—and slides them between the cheeks of Daniel's ass. Finds the puckered entrance, hushing the rude and cheerful ghost in his mind: if he comes out with the phrase _ripe and glistening man-cherry_ right now, Daniel may just find the strength to leap out of bed. He probes. Two fingers slip in easily.

Daniel inhales deeply and pushes back. _"Not_ a nervous virgin here, Jack," he says, sounding slightly cross.

O'Neill ignores him, pulling out, adding more lube—he doubts Daniel will notice the temperature by this point—going back again. He's sure Daniel's telling the truth about his experience. He's also sure that Daniel's capable of stringing himself tight enough to give a nervous virgin a run for his money. But he's got three fingers in Daniel's ass all the way to the third knuckle now, and it looks like they're good to go.

He withdraws his fingers—with a little twist for luck—and lies down behind Daniel, placing the head of his cock over the opening. Hot and slick. He pushes forward. Daniel takes another deep breath and pushes back. There's a moment of negotiation as the cockhead slips in, then he's gliding balls-deep and Daniel surges back into his arms, with a little hitch of his hips to lock everything up nice and tight.

"Oh god," he gasps, and Daniel whispers: "Yes."

He can feel the hot clutch of muscle all around his cock, tight and good, and he just stays there for a while, pressed against Daniel's back, forehead against his shoulder, working past the automatic urge just to go at it as hard and fast as he can, giving Daniel time to get used to this. Not to what they're doing. That's pretty much a minor detail overall. But that _they're_ doing it.

Then he wraps an arm under Daniel's knee, pressing his leg upward—balance, reassurance. Probably a little soon to ring Daniel's bell again, but this can still be nice. Daniel's hand fastens over his, clutching, and his head drops back, pressed against O'Neill's shoulder. He shifts a little to get his other arm completely under Daniel, around his waist. Daniel clutches at that one too, as if he's trying to convince himself that O'Neill is _here._  
  
And then it's time to move, because Daniel's making breathy impatient noises—good—and he's pretty sure he's going to die in a number of interesting ways if he doesn't. He pulls back, pushes forward. Settles in to the sweet intense reality of it, finding out what Daniel likes. Doing everything he can think of to _hold off,_ short of going to the nightmare places in his mind that would just shut him down completely. There are a few of those.

Daniel's nearly silent, but his breath is ragged; moans or maybe even growls if it were louder. The quiet would be more unnerving if O'Neill weren't completely wrapped around him and getting a whole body's worth of nonverbal cues; he's arching his back and pushing his hips back to meet every thrust, and any minute now—

There.

His head comes forward off O'Neill's shoulder and he curls around himself, pulling his arms in and dropping both elbows to the mattress so he can get the leverage to _really_ push back. His spine bows instead of arches, and O'Neill tightens his grip and begins to thrust faster and he can hear the sibilants that mean that Daniel's whispering something, but he can't make out the words and he feels _don't stop now_ and then he isn't thrusting anymore, he's just grinding into Daniel's ass as hard as he can, pumping into him, nobody home but Primitive Man going _mine, mine, mine_ as fireworks go off behind his eyes _..._  
  
He manages to pry his fingers loose from Daniel's thigh before collapsing—one good thing about this position, nobody's on the bottom—and wraps both arms around Daniel. Daniel eases the bent leg down slowly; the motion sends aftershocks of pleasure through O'Neill.

He feels himself drifting off—nothing much else on the agenda for tonight but snuggle followed by crash and Dani can sleep on the _roof_ tonight for all he cares—when he realizes that Daniel's trembling like a leaf in a high wind, and that isn't right. He drags the part of his brain capable of stringing words together into a coherent sentence up to the top of his mind with an effort—it'd be here a lot faster if there were guns involved, but still—and says:

"Hey." Okay, not much of a sentence, but he's still welded to Daniel's ass.

"Okay." _'I'm okay, Jack.'_

 _The hell you are._ "So." He kisses the side of Daniel's neck. It's what he can reach right now. He moves his hand a little further down and finds Daniel's cock still soft, but the head is slick. He cradles it against Daniel's belly. He knows he didn't hurt him. It's something else.

"I wanted this," Daniel says. His voice is very quiet. There's no inflection in it that O'Neill can hear.

"But?" he says.

He's soft enough now to pull out—actually, he went soft the moment Daniel started doing the 'wounded fish in the water' thing. He pulls back, settles in again. Daniel isn't pulling away. That's good.

"No. I _wanted_ this. Jack. You don't know."

He _does_ know, actually. Daniel said the other-him, the one Daniel fell in love with—first? he hopes so—was straight. And he isn't. And that proves—what?—to Daniel.

"And now you've...?"

Daniel pulls away, but only enough to turn over and wrap himself around O'Neill again. He's still shaking, but not as much. "Now I have it," he says, and there's a faintly-questioning note in his voice.

"Yes, Daniel, you do."

He learned a long time ago that it doesn't matter how much Daniel (whichever Daniel) likes to lecture and babble and play with words, there are times when the only proper response is the simple declarative sentence.

Daniel sighs—as if somebody's let all of the air out of him—and the shaking eases off. O'Neill strokes his back, and thinks—vaguely, with a corner of his mind—about the blankets. Ought to make a move on them soon.

"It wasn't worth it," Daniel says. A low whisper. Almost too low to hear, and it would be insulting if O'Neill didn't know exactly what Daniel means. Daniel has what he wanted. And the price was too high.

"Not your choice. Not your decision. C'mon, let's get those covers up over you."

"Because you're cold?" Daniel suggests, and there's actually a faint note of mockery in his voice. Good. The voice is a little blurred now, too; another good sign. He shifts away; O'Neill pulls up the covers, Daniel goes for the towels. Lube gets everywhere.

And they lie down again. He turns out the light—having made sure to be on the side with the phone and the guns—and the room is dark. Daniel settles against him—they're back on track now, cuddling and crashing, and there's a chance for sleeping in and more sex in the morning. Life is good.

"Jack?" Daniel's almost asleep, but there's been a conversation going on in his head and they've just gotten to the end. He's pretty sure he knows his lines.

"Daniel?"

"You won't leave, will you?"

He can't promise he won't die, or even that he won't just vanish on a mission; he can't even promise he won't be transferred. There's only one right answer, though. "No."

"Good." And Daniel is asleep. O'Neill counts his breaths, and doesn't even make it to twenty. There's no point in worrying about things you can't possibly control.

#

When O'Neill wakes up in the morning, Daniel is sprawled across half the bed and has still managed to trap his arm under him. He starts to roll away—first step in getting his arm back and seeing if it can be salvaged; he can't feel it at all—and finds that he can't, because Dani is curled up against his back.

 _So this is how it's going to be?_ he thinks, and realizes, _yes, this is how it's going to be._  
  
No secrets at all.

It's an odd idea. Not completely uncomfortable. Just odd. His life—personal, professional—has been composed of secrets for well more than half of it. Danny—the Stargate Program—were just the latest set of secrets.

This will be easier in some ways. Nobody will look twice at Colonel O'Neill's relationship with Dr. Danielle Jackson. And because of it, nobody will suspect the full extent of his relationship with Dr. Daniel Jackson. A secret the three of them can keep, until the day it doesn't matter any longer.

For whatever reason that turns out to be.

"Move," he says to no one in particular. There's no response from either of them, and it takes him several minutes to work his arm free. By then Daniel is, if not awake, at least responsive enough to be helpful. He moves over enough to give O'Neill the space to turn onto his back. The sensation of returning circulation is exquisitely painful.

Something rings.

"Phone," Daniel says groggily, rolling back over onto his stomach and pulling a pillow over his head.

The ringing is coming from Dani's side of the bed. From the floor, actually; O'Neill remembers stuffing his cellphone into one of his shoes for safekeeping at the beginning of last night. She rolls over and scrabbles blindly around the floor, guided by the ongoing maddening ringing. She picks up the phone, waves it in the air.

"Answer it," he tells her. If they're going to lie by misdirection, now is the time to start.

She flips it open, still half asleep. "Jackson," she says.

Whatever she hears brings her all the way awake. She stares at him accusingly, still listening. "He's right here," she says.

"General Hammond would like to talk to you," she says, handing him the phone.

#

It's going on March now. A little over five months here as citizens. He and Daniel are lovers, though what everyone thinks is that O'Neill's having an affair with the other Dr. Jackson, and that's true, too.

Their actual relationship—the relationship among all three of them—is something they never talk about. It's a kick in the head that the gay sex Daniel is having is something more normal—if you're charting degrees of normal—than his straight sex. O'Neill's just risking prison and/or execution as usual—though he suspects, without hubris, that if it ever came to that, Earth _really_ wouldn't like the results, and he plans endgames and exit strategies. Each of them has one hidden and forbidden relationship, but Daniel has two. There are times that O'Neill thinks it amuses him.

The mathematics of sex-with-three could verge on a porn movie, but neither of them is really interested in that, and he isn't either. Both of them in bed at the same time is interesting enough.

He's not sure whether they're exhibitionists or just consider him part of their personal world. Probably the latter. He's watched them have sex, and it was mind-blowingly hot, even though Daniel had just sucked his brains out through his cock and he thought the roof might have fallen in, too. Okay, so it's a cliché, but he's entitled to a few in the privacy of his own mind.

#

_Daniel sits back, rumpled and dazed and looking smug. Still hard. O'Neill figures he should be a gentleman and pass him the lube, but Dani swings her leg sideways and taps the back of Daniel's foot with her ankle, and Daniel straightens up and uncurls, stripping off the condom, and lies back and rolls over and onto her._

_There's no foreplay at all._

_She hitches herself up, locking her heels over the backs of Daniel's thighs, and O'Neill can smell her, hear the wet sucking sound Daniel's cock makes moving in her. And watching them together is hot, even though there's nothing he's in any condition to do about it, or wants to do about it really, except watch them and take mental notes and wish it weren't suicidally stupid to think of getting them on film. And it's also sweet in a weird way, because they're here, and they're safe._

_Dani turns her face toward him, watching him watch them, and he smiles at her. She holds out her hand, reaching for him, and he holds her hand as Daniel thrusts into her, and she and Daniel talk, intermittently and breathlessly, in a language O'Neill doesn't know._

_After Daniel comes—head thrown back and gasping softly; he always sounds as if he's just about to ask a question and forgets it halfway through—she lies between them and finishes herself, pressed against his side as Daniel strokes her stomach._

__

#

She's watched the two of them together. The full meal deal; Daniel on his knees, O'Neill pushing into him from behind. It was a while before they got there; the last frontier. He isn’t up to the math skills involved in all of this (he insists), but he knows that Dani loves both of them enough to give them a privacy she's never claimed for herself. Pointless, really: having her there doesn't make the act of penetration any more actual or unreal than having her downstairs, or in the other bedroom, and she's seen everything else.

So they stop shutting her out.

#

_He pushes in—careful, precise, familiar—and Daniel arches his back, then bows it, pushing back. It's both alarming and comforting to know they're being watched. Witnessed._

_Marriages are witnessed._

_And he can't marry Daniel, now or ever. He could marry Dani, but he can't marry Dani-and-Daniel, and he won't leave either of them behind, even if they'd abandon each other. He strokes his hand down Daniel's thigh, smoothing the fine hairs. He feels Daniel clench around him for an instant, then relax, and pulls back. Slides forward again. Hears the nearly-inaudible sound Daniel makes when he's being filled, the indication that all is well in Danielworld._

_He's had Dani on her hands and knees. It's completely different._

_Not better. Not worse. Just different. He has that in common with Daniel. The inability to come down on one side or the other of the goddamned fence._

_And there's an absolute difference between them, because while Daniel's relationships with men after he joined Stargate Command had to be clandestine, they weren't illegal._

_And O'Neill's were. Always were._

_His hands settle firmly on Daniel's hips as he finds his rhythm and Daniel relaxes completely, locking his joints and bracing himself and going still. It's not exactly passivity, but the action is all inside Daniel's head now: the three of them that are usually in the bed in this situation are Daniel, Daniel's body, and O'Neill, and it was the same way with Danny, and O'Neill knows half-a-dozen ways to trick them both into going where Daniel needs them to go._

_Danny was always happily noisy in bed; Daniel is nearly silent. If he's going to get Daniel off first—always nice—O'Neill has to gauge his progress by Braille and sign-language; the tensing of the muscles beneath his hands, the shifting of Daniel's hips against his, the way he'll drop to his forearms and press his head into the pillows when he's getting close. At that point it's usually time to move things along; get an arm around Daniel and a fist around his cock and the whole reason Mother Church tells you you're going to Hell for this is it's so damned good..._

_But tonight Dani's here, and if O'Neill's pretty sure she doesn't know what Daniel looks like when he's getting done, she certainly knows the sounds he makes when he's near the edge. She moves in and gets her hand on Daniel's cock, and O'Neill's never felt Daniel come apart quite this way before. He's glad he's still got both hands on Daniel's hips, because he needs them there; all of a sudden Daniel's pushing back and jerking forward and clenching around him and an errant thought about milking machines flits across the surface of O'Neill's mind while he's trying to think about glaciers and it's doing him no damned good at all. So he just hauls back as hard as he can, because there's being considerate and there's being a masochist and he's never been a masochist. And Daniel's ass grinds into him and oh god, that's it, and thank god Daniel's stopped moving because now O'Neill can thrust again, rounding things off, a few strokes before he pries his fingers loose from Daniel's hips and drops his weight to his hands, rounding over Daniel's back._

_All the parts are the best part, but he likes this, pressing his face into the back of Daniel's neck, feeling Daniel's legs slowly slide flat against the sheets. He stays on his knees long enough to work himself free, then heaves over onto his side, pulling Daniel with him. Belly to back, all boneless warmth and solid weight, and he tightens his arm around Daniel's chest._

_"Jack always told you not to touch things," Daniel says, and his voice is low and slurred, as if he can't quite figure out how to talk yet. He's talking to Dani, and Jack hears her move, pulling the covers up from the foot of the bed over all three of them._

_"Did," she says, but he never did. He told_ Danny _not to touch things, demanding, entreating (and sometimes Danny even listened.) He's never gone through the Gate with either Dani or Daniel, and he never will. They aren't certified for Gate travel and they don't want to be._

_He feels Daniel stroke his hand. The bed jostles again as Dani moves, settling closer. There's always an argument over who sleeps in the middle, since none of them wants to, but it looks like tonight Daniel's lost. From the sound of his breathing, he's almost asleep._  
  


#

It's Saturday morning, and O'Neill doesn't have an offworld mission. Dani and Daniel, of course, aren't attached to any Gate Team. Jack's bed is big enough for three.

Dani is straddling his hips. The position is the most forgiving for his knees and back; besides, she likes to be on top. Her thighs clamp his as she rocks herself on him, and the last time he could see her face she looked as if she was prepared to keep going—just this way—for hours. He can't see her face now because Daniel is in the way. Daniel is kissing him the way O'Neill has discovered that Daniel does everything—carefully. The other half of Team Jackson apparently got all of Danny's wild abandon, but careful's all right just now; he'd like this to go on for a while.

He has a hand around Daniel's cock and is jacking him off. Slow and steady and deliberate, the way Daniel likes it, and concentrating on that is good, because it means that the three of them will be here for a while.

He's got one hand on Dani's thigh as she rocks methodically back and forth, her back very straight. She can't settle on where to put her hands; they skim over everything she can touch. Daniel had a hand on her back until he decided that kissing was more fun; he can't kiss her while she's moving, anyway, and O'Neill doesn't exactly want her to stop. He's got Daniel good and distracted right now, though. Or maybe focused is the word. So they'll all get where they're going, and there's a game on later and then dinner and _somebody_ better shovel that snow some time today and then there'll be sleep.

A good life.

###


End file.
